Motorsport: Ford heat on Holden leader

Friday motorsport reportDecember 8, 2006

'Kid' Kelly keeps his cool
The Ford camp is turning up the heat on Holden's V8 Supercar Championship leader Rick Kelly ahead of the weekend's grand finale at Victoria's Phillip Island, hammering the point that the young Kelly has not won any of the 12 rounds so far. However, Kelly -- who takes only a seven-point lead over Ford's Craig Lowndes, winner of four rounds this season, into the final -- is keeping his cool. "I am feeling relaxed and ready to roll," Kelly says.

The Kelly camp has been emphasising that its plan from the outset was that  consistent high finishes were what was needed to win the title under the existing points system, and that at that game their man has been the best. It is somewhat ironic in the heartland of AFL football, in which coaches want players to be consistent performers rather than brilliant one week and battlers the next, that a driver should be under fire for doing an outstanding job every time he goes to work.

Kelly, on 3068 points, has already pointed out that if he emerges champion there won't be any asterisk in the record books to say he didn't win a round. "At times it has meant being patient, controlling that rush of blood which can undo your whole season," he says.

Lowndes, with 3061 points, already has three championships to his credit -- all of them in his Holden days before his controversial switch to the Blue Oval in 2001. He became the youngest champion in 1996 at 21 years, 11 months and 11 days. Kelly will become the second youngest champ at 23 years nine months and 23 days if he comes out on top by late Sunday afternoon.

Both have won two Bathursts, which -- despite the emphasis on the championship in recent years -- arguably remains the greatest prize in Australian motor racing. Although Ford took the honors at Bathurst this year, with Lowndes and teammate Jamie Whincup, Holden has the better record in the Great Race, with 25 wins to Ford's 14.

However, things are the other way around the championship. If Lowndes takes the title this weekend it will be the 21st for a Ford driver, while if it becomes Kelly's crown he will be the 14th for Holden.

This is the first time in nine years the winning team will not be the Holden Racing Team or Stone Brothers Racing. Kelly's HSV squad has already won the teams' championship ahead of Lowndes' Triple Eight. The last team other than Stone Bros or HRT to have the champion driver was Glenn Seton Racing in 1997. HRT won from 1998 through to 2002, with Lowndes in 1998-99 and Mark Skaife from 2000-02. Since 2003 it has been Stone Bros with Marcos Ambrose in 2003-04 and last season Russell Ingall, who is fifth this year on 2612 points -- and just one point ahead of Jason Bright, winner of the Bahrain round two weeks ago for Ford Performance Racing.

Kelly hasn't been in a title fight before. In the four years he has been in the series full-time he has finished 16th  in 2002, eighth in '03, sixth in '04 and eighth again in '05.

Twice when Lowndes has won the championship he had to wait until the final round to clinch it. This is the 20th time the title has been decided at the final round; 17 of the previous 19 times the leader going into the last round has come out on top. This is the sixth time the final has had three title contenders, with FPR's Mark Winterbottom a distant third chance for the crown this weekend on 2792 points.

Lowndes has won five races at Phillip Island over the years and been the round winner in 1998 and 2003. He's also been second overall twice and in seven of eight rounds at the Island has finished in the top seven. Kelly was third in last year's round behind Ford's Marcos Ambrose and his HSV teammate Garth Tander, who with 2709 points is challenging Winterbottom for third in the championship and has the best average starting position this season at 2.3, compared with Skaife's 4, Lowndes' 6 and Kelly's 6.9.

Skaife is a three-time round winner at Phillip Island but has had a wretched season. "The red cars have been fast on plenty of occasions this year, but the trophy cabinet doesn't really reflect the sort of pace we've had," Skaife says. "This recent run of bad luck I've been having is just one of those things. Greg Chappell had a run of ducks during his Test cricket career, so even the best have a bad trot. They do, and will, eventually end."

Skaife's teammate Todd Kelly, Rick's older brother, has been in form recently though, with five top five finishes in a row, four of which have been podiums -- including his Gold Coast Indy win.

Townsville hopes in vain
Townsville isn't taking the Queensland government's refusal to fund a V8 Supercar steet race in the city lying down. The ABC reports that the Townsville City Council hasn't given up hope, with acting Mayor Anne Bunnell saying it will "go back to the drawing board".

However, Premier Peter Beattie says: "It didn't stack up financially. It's a shame, we did everything we could to make it work [but] unfortunately the costs were prohibitive -- $12 to $13 million recurrent per year. That's not including the capital costs, and the capital cost was $11 million," Beattie says.

Sports Minister Andrew Fraser, who had the job of breaking the news of the "thumbs down" earlier in the week, says: "The reality is I'm a motor racing fan as much as anyone, so this is not a decision that I enjoyed making, but in the end the first responsibility for all governments is to make sure they make responsible decisions and that's what we've had to do in this circumstance."

It may not be music to the ears of V8 Supercar officials and fans, but the figures on street races don't stack up. The South Australian government is happy to underwrite the Clipsal 500, but the NSW and WA governments have rejected proposals for street races at the Sydney Olympic site at Homebush and at Fremantle. And the ACT Government pulled the plug on the Canberra street race after just a couple of years.

The Formula One Grand Prix in Melbourne and the Gold Coast Indy cost taxpayers in those states many millions of dollars a year, but at least the organisers -- or the governments they answer to -- can claim benefits from international television coverage, although even some of those claims don't bear a lot of scrutiny.

F1's funny money game
Some interesting developments are going on in and around the F1 empire, still very much controlled by Bernie Ecclestone. The key Ecclestone company SLEC -- an abbreviation for Ecclestone's wife Slavica's name, and which is now 75 per cent owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners and the Ecclestone family trust, Bambino -- has accepted it has to repay a US$313 million loan taken out in 2001 to buy the commercial rights to F1 for 100 years from the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). Swiss finance organisation Kamos began legal action against SLEC and Bambino in July to recover the loan.

While SLEC has agreed to pay, who it owes the money to is not so clear. The right to reclaim the loan has been sold several times since the money was handed over in 2001, when SLEC was majority-owned by German media giant Kirch, which subsequently went bust. A Kirch subsidiary, Formel Eins Beteiligungs (FEB), gave its parent the bulk of the loan. FEB took out another loan from Swiss bank Credit Suisse, secured on the right to repayment from SLEC.

Credit Suisse later sold the right and it has ended up in the hands of another Swiss finance organization, Kamos, which apparently paid $5 million in September 2005 for that right. Kamos sued after SLEC claimed the loan was not legally repayable.

A court case in Germany is investigating Kirch's affairs and whether its subsidiary FEB should be paid the loan money. The High Court in London will rule next March on whether the Kamos legal action in Britain should be delayed until the German case is resolved. SLEC says this is necessary so there is no confusion over who is owed the money.

If Kamos ends up being paid the $313 million it will make a 6260 per cent return on its investment -- a profit that would upstage even the master dealer Ecclestone. Just wonder whether we may discover one day that Ecclestone owns a piece of Kamos.
It would be unlike him to be on the wrong side of such a winning deal!

Summit on customer cars
F1 team bosses are to meet in Europe tonight discuss whether Super Aguri and Scuderia Toro Rosso's plans for 2007 cars are a breach of the sport's regulations. Several team principals are upset that the two teams are planning to effectively run customer chassis next season, which is not allowed under the terms of the Concorde Agreement expiring next year but will seemingly be allowed from 2008.

Super Aguri and Toro Rosso claim they are complying with the '07 rules. Super Aguri wants to run a development version of this year's Honda, while Toro Rosso wants to have the same Adrian Newey-designed chassis as its parent, Red Bull Racing, but with a different rear end to house the Ferrari engine rather than the Renault that Red Bull Racing will have.

Spyker, the Dutch-owned team that was formerly Midland and originally Jordan, is leading the action against Super Aguri and Toro Rosso. Williams is also strongly opposed and has considered legal action, claiming FIA president Max Mosley vetoed any plans for chassis sharing in '07 at a meeting in Paris on September 18.

The picture is clouded by Super Aguri arguing that its car is not built at Honda's F1 headquarters in Britain but at the Honda research and development facility in Japan. The intellectual property rights to this year's Honda, it seems, have been transferred from the race team to Honda Motor Company to allow Super Aguri to develop the concept.

Even though Super Aguri did not score a championship in its first F1 season this year, and it was only at the last race in Brazil that Takuma Sato finished in the top 10, its managing director Daniele Audetto predicts the team could win a Grand Prix as early as early as '08. That the biggest, and silliest, F1 prediction since some of the nonsense from British American Racing when it started in 1999.

Richards claims manufacturer interest
Prodrive chief David Richards, who has a licence to start the 12th F1 team in 2008, claims two car companies want to take advantage of the F1 rules from that year to provide customer cars, that would avoid his new outfit needing to complete design and build its own.

The candidates could be Renault, Mercedes (which is already linked to, and indeed reportedly may already have already fully acquired, McLaren) or perhaps BMW (which took over Sauber a year ago). Richards, who briefly ran the Benetton F1 team and headed Honda during its most successful season since its return to the sport, has approval for a new factory at a former airfield at Wroxall in Warwickshire.

McLaren's new star shines
McLaren's young black rookie, Lewis Hamilton, topped the latest F1 testing overnight at Jerez in western Spain. It was the first time this pre-season that a Ferrari had not been at the top of the timesheets. Hamilton was more than a second quicker than next best Giancarlo Fisichella in a Renault as former Michelin-shod teams continued to adapt to Bridgestone tyres for the 2007 season. Hamilton had been third quickest -- behind the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Luca Badoer -- on the first day of the Jerez test, which continues tonight.

Rubens Barrichello was third fastest last night for Honda, ahead of Nico Rosberg in a Williams-Toyota, then Ralf Schumacher in a factory Toyota, with Massa sixth for Ferrari. Aussie Mark Webber was 13th of the 17 drivers on the track but has been the quickest of the Red Bull drivers on each of the four days he has done at Jerez and Barcelona. Webber's '07 teammate, David Coulthard, has been on track on three of those days.

Heck! Heikki concedes already
Renault rookie Heikki Kovalainen has conceded already that his team won't produce the world champion for a third straight year. Kovalainen rates fellow Finn Kimi Raikkonen, who is moving from McLaren to replace Michael Schumacher at Ferrari, favorite for the title, ahead of Spaniard Fernando Alonso, the world champion the past two years with Renault, and Ferrari's Brazilian, Felipe Massa.

Not only does Kovalainen not have his Italian teammate Giancarlo Fisichella among the top three title favorites, the Finnish newcomer says he's not stressing about winning races himself yet. "I want finish my first grand prix in Melbourne and I want get a good start this season," Kovalainen says.

McLaren 'cost Kimi two titles'
McLaren chief Ron Dennis says Raikkonen should have been world champion twice with the team. "We should have won two world championships together, and it was our fault that we didn't, not his," Dennis says. Presumably he means in 2004 and '05, because there is no way McLaren deserved a title this year.

Dennis says McLaren will be debt-free by January 28 next year, two weeks earlier than he had previously predicted. "We have never been as commercially healthy in our entire history," he says. "I am fiercely proud of our commercial performance. I am very confident that we will be extremely well financed for the next five to 10 years. And we have a great driver line-up. The ingredients are good, but we don't know what the opposition is doing, and you can never underestimate that.

"I don't want to make any predictions about 2007, but we have already achieved many of our goals. Our chassis was the first to pass its crash tests and we will have two of our new cars when we launch in Valencia in mid-January. We have never had the comfort that we now have with our program."

Three seats still swinging
Three pieces are still missing from the F1 driver jigsaw for '07, although the new season is still more than three months away. The Spyker team has not indicated whether it is keeping Portuguese driver Tiago Monteiro and Scuderia Toro Rosso, the second Red Bull team, has not confirmed whether it will keep Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi and American Scott Speed. Fernando Alonso's McLaren will carry the No. 1 he earned as world champion with Renault, while his new teammate Lewis Hamilton will carry No. 2. Here's the line-up, with car numbers, as it stands:

McLaren -- 1 Fernando Alonso, 2 Lewis Hamilton
Renault -- 3 Giancarlo Fisichella, 4 Heikki Kovalainen
Ferrari -- 5 Felipe Massa, 6 Kimi Raikkonen
Honda -- 7 Jenson Button, 8 Rubens Barrichello
BMW Sauber -- 9 Nick Heidfeld, 10 Robert Kubica
Toyota -- 11 Ralf Schumacher, 12 Jarno Trulli
Red Bull -- 14 David Coulthard, 15 Mark Webber
Williams -- 16 Nico Rosberg, 17 Alexander Wurz
Toro Rosso -- 18 TBA, 19 TBA
Spyker -- 20 Christijan Albers, 21 TBA
Super Aguri -- 22 Takuma Sato, 23 Anthony Davidson

Liberated Schumi says grazie
Michael Schumacher was given the key to Maranello, Ferrari's home town, this week and thanked mayor Lucia Bursi in Italian, a language he rarely used in 11 years racing for the Prancing Horse. Schumi says he's enjoying life away from race tracks. "Retiring was liberating, as F1 demands a lot of your time," he says.