MOTORSPORT: Renault set to stay in F1

New majority owner likely within days
Having seen the exit of three major car manufacturers in the past year, Formula One looks to have retained France's Renault -- although on a scaled back basis.

European reports, especially by BBC Sport expert, Andrew Benson, indicate that up to 75 per cent of Renault's F1 team will be acquired by a new owner, but that it will continue to carry the Renault name. The buyer is most likely to be either Luxembourg businessman Gerard Lopez, who heads Genii Capital and was an early investor in Skype, or the Prodrive outfit of David Richards which (among other enterprises) operates Ford Performance Vehicles and Ford Performance Racing in Australia.

Prodrive, which ran Subaru's World Rally Championship team until it was scrapped a year ago, also controls the Aston Martin brand -- with the backing of Middle East money. Richards himself has F1 experience -- he ran an early incarnation of this Renault team in its days as Benetton, and he headed British American Racing after founder Craig Pollock was elbowed aside.

Renault appears not to want to sever its F1 ties, despite the embarrassment it has worn from the scandal of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, at which Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet was instructed to crash to help Spanish dual world champion teammate, Fernando Alonso, to win the race. Long-time Renault F1 team principal Flavio Briatore has been banned from F1 for life and engineering director Pat Symonds for five years over that incident, although they have appeals pending in early January.

Renault scaling back to 25 per cent ownership while still retaining the team name is an unusual outcome, but it will give F1 the appearance of being able to retain a traditional manufacturer participant.

Essentially, we suspect, it will be a privateer team with a Renault factory engine. In addition, Red Bull Racing (Australian driver Mark Webber's team) will continue to use Renault engines.

What will remain to be seen is whether the Renault team can regain competitiveness without the engineering expertise of Symonds, if indeed he remains banned from the sport. The colourful Briatore brought a managerial genius (flawed genius) to the team that it is difficult to envisage being allowed to return to the paddock, although he has been a close associate of F1 tsar Bernie Ecclestone.

Briatore's ‘executioner' was seen to have been Max Mosley, who has now gone as Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) president.

Jean Todt, the Frenchman who ran Peugeot's world rally activities and then Ferrari's F1 team so brilliantly, is now in the big chair at the FIA -- and much has been happening there this week. More on that in a moment.

Our suspicion is that Lopez is the more likely buyer of the majority stake in the Renault team. But he has some unusual views, and has expressed some of them at a motorsport business forum in Monaco this week.

Here is a sample of what he had to say:
"The situation (in F1) is such right now that it provides an opportunity for new teams and new investors. It's not a time of uncertainty but a time of change. Times of change usually provide an entry point.

"We believe there is a chance to enter the sport and build a platform that sort of has to reinvent itself. If we were to become part of F1 we could be part of that reinvention. The business opportunities in F1 lie very rarely in making money out of your team. They should lie in making money out of the business platform that you have.

"Put any seasoned executive into F1 and they turn into a big kid. It makes them much more approachable. So, for us, F1 is an excellent business-to-business platform," Lopez told the BBC.

A whole lot more points to F1?
With Jean Todt now directing affairs at the FIA, there is a World Motorsport Council meeting in Paris tonight, Australian time. And with little warning it seems that a new F1 points system may emerge from it.

The system is not the winner-takes-almost-all system proposed by Bernie Ecclestone, but one with 25 points for a grand prix instead of the 10 of recent years. UK specialist website Autosport has more here.

Plotting new paths for rallying
More important for motorsport in the long run may be talks that have been going on at an FIA rally forum this week.

Presided over by Todt and New Zealand's FIA deputy president for sport Graham Stoker, the forum brought together promoters, teams, manufacturers and drivers from the WRC, the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, the Dakar Rally and other cross-country championships.

Manufacturers represented included Citroen, Ford, Volkswagen and BMW. And among the drivers were Carlos Sainz, Guy Frequelin, Michele Mouton, Juha Kankkunen, Petter Solberg and Armindo Araujo.

The outcome is a working group has been formed to plan the development of rallying worldwide. So far it is nothing more than words, but Todt may just be the man to drive genuine progress in rallying.

Those who should know say Senna the best
Approaching Christmas it's a time for reflection, and F1 drivers were asked to do just that by Autosport by voting on who they rated the greatest GP drivers.

The 217 drivers who participated (with a combined 9194 GP starts and 270 wins between them) ranked Ayrton Senna number one, ahead of Michael Schumacher and Juan-Manuel Fangio.

Among those who voted were Schumacher, Jose Froilan Gonzalez, the earliest surviving GP winner, Paul Pietsch, at 98 the oldest living driver, this year's world champion Jenson Button and many others in the modern F1 field.

We look forward to seeing the full results, and particularly where a couple of this author's favourites -- Gilles Villeneuve and Jochen Rindt -- figured.

On the subject of reflection, we came across an interesting ESPN interview with Sir Stirling Moss recently. Headlined "Motorsport without danger is like cooking without salt" it contains the views of a pure old racer, although public perceptions and standards have legitimately required that much greater attention be paid to safety. Nonetheless, Moss is always entertaining.

Ten extends GP telecasts deal to 2015
Network Ten will remain Australia's F1 telecaster until at least 2015 under an extension of its contract with Formula One Management. No surprise in that, and it keeps the TV deal in sync with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation's contract for the race in Melbourne until the same year.

GPs will continue to be telecast live on Ten's digital sports channel, OneHD, and delayed on its main channel, although the Australian GP will remain live on that main channel. For the first time the agreement includes online, mobile and IPTV rights.

Britain's SportsPro Media has put an annual value of US$8m on the deal, and US$40m for the five-year extension from 2011.