Motorsport: Skaife denies HRT power struggle

Midweek motorsport reportJanuary 31, 2007

Walkinshaw, the international automotive entrepreneur whose Arrows Formula 1 team ignominiously folded four years ago, has re-emerged as a prominent player in Australian V8 racing in the past couple of years and rumors have been rife of a power struggle between him and Skaife within HRT.

Skaife assumed ownership of HRT in a hurry amid the Arrows collapse, while Walkinshaw Performance is contracted to provide technical expertise.

In this week's edition of Auto Action magazine Skaife says: "People have got this misconception that it's Tom Walkinshaw versus Mark Skaife. It's not. It's Tom Walkinshaw and Mark Skaife, and we have a collective goal of doing the best job for Holden in motorsport.

"We're not at odds on anything -- on how to make a car go faster and what we have to do to win races.

"Tom's an experienced racing guy with a great history of success. He's been able to come in with a fresh pair of eyes and look at stuff we probably needed to do better job of."

Despite Skaife finishing only 16th in last year's V8 Supercar Championship, the worst result of his career, and HRT being overshadowed by its title-winning "sister" HSV Dealer Team, the five-time touring car champion says "the progress we made through 2006 has been really good". And Walkinshaw's input and experience "have absolutely been welcomed", Skaife says.

Recruiting Crompton was critical, says 7's head of sport Saul Shtein. "He's the most credible bloke in the business -- the marquee player," Shtein says.

Crompton joins Matthew White, Mark Beretta, Grant Denyer and new face Daniel Gibson in the 7 team, which will be under the direction of the experienced Murray Lomax with production done by V8 Supercar Australia's own TV unit.

Irrespective of how the AFL telecast imbroglio unravels -- whether 7 and 10 have to show all eight games a week, perhaps with some "assistance" from SBS, or whether Fox comes back into the picture and screens half the games -- Shtein has been making soothing noises this week about the prominence the V8s will have on the network.

"We've been entrusted with this wonderful property and we're not going in there to try to put it on the shelf or put it to the side," Shtein told Auto Action.

AA says 7's plan is to show all qualifying from most rounds, followed by support race highlights leading into live Saturday afternoon coverage of the first heat at sprint race rounds, while Sunday afternoons will feature a slightly delayed screening of race two, feeding into the third race live.

There will be F1-style timing of pitstops, greater use of Flycam -- the overhead camera along pitlane -- and the capability of uninterrupted in-car coverage with the phasing out of helicopter links.

A half-hour magazine show between rounds will concentrate on news and features. Also scheduled, apart from development series and support race packages, are four one-our specials, starting with a season preview on February 24.

Team Australia A1 boss Alan Jones, the 1980 Formula 1 world champion, has been under pressure to install a higher-profile driver since Ryan Briscoe opted for the security of a three-year sports car racing contract with Porsche and Roger Penske in the US.

Names tossed up have been mainly those of V8 Supercar drivers with fairly recent and good open-wheeler form -- including James Courtney, Will Davison, Marcus Marshall, and even the country's latest Formula Ford champion, John Martin. 

"I could put a reincarnated Ayrton Senna in our car and there would still be someone complaining about my choice," says Jones, who is sticking with Reindler for now with Ian Dyk and Barton Mawer as the rookie and reserve respectively.

Jones says that Reindler "is actually coming along quite nicely, I think". The 21-year-old West Australian won the national Formula 3 title in 2004 and has since been racing in British F3, although he's not sure where he's headed after this A1 season.

Reindler is counting on his knowledge of Eastern Creek helping him in front of the largely patriotic element of what is likely to be a very modest crowd this weekend. "I'm feeling confidient and aiming to be in the top five," he says. "It's a huge race for me -- and for Team Australia. There's a fair bit of pressure, but I don't mind pressure. I'm not fazed."

The weather was bad and restricted most of the nine teams participating in the test from running as much as they wanted. It did, however, allow some testing of Bridgestone's latest extreme wet-weather tyre.

Webber did only 32 laps -- the third least of 14 drivers on track -- and was 13th on the timesheet, with only Ferrari test driver Luca Badoer slower in a modified version of last year's 248 model red machine that clearly had a problem.

A report from Germany suggests Ferrari may have been given privileged information about the likely direction of tyre development this year by Bridgestone, now the sole supplier of race rubber in F1.

It has been noted in the Cologne-based Express newspaper that the F2007 has a longer wheelbase than the 248 while other teams have gone for shorter-wheelbase cars to cope with the anticipated characteristics of the Bridgestones and the required weight distribution.

Ferrari has long been the Japanese tyre manufacturer's favored partner but Norbert Haug, motorsport director of McLaren part-owner and engine supplier Mercedes-Benz, says "it would be a big mistake (with only one supplier in the sport) for Bridgestone to prefer one partner over the others".

Apart from teams having to run on two compounds during races, with indications all will opt for the least preferred compound for the final stages of races, there is a move afoot for tyre choices to be announced to spectators and television viewers as GPs get underway.

Schumacher was at Ferrari's launch of the F2007 and in the garage during its first test run at Fiorano, the team's private test track at Maranello in Italy -- although both times he was kept clear of media cameras.

However, Webber reckons Schumi's presence can only add to pressure on Raikkonen.

"It's odd having him (Schumacher) around, I think -- really odd," Webber says. "It's like having your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend there. Kimi must go 'what the ..?' It must feel so strange to have the teacher's pet standing above you while you are trying to get on with your own new program. Suffocation or what?"

Reality is Ferrari knows more about success in F1 than anyone -- and it might feel inclined to point that out to Webber if he touches on the "handover" at the Italian team again. Our Aussie boy might be best to concentrate on things in his own garage.

Prodrive in McLaren chief's sights?
Cashed up by the sale of half his stake in McLaren, Ron Dennis could be eyeing an investment in David Richards' Prodrive, which has a franchise to enter F1 as the 12th team next year -- and also runs Ford Performance Racing in Australia's V8 Supercar Championship and Subaru's world rally team.

Again the suggestion comes from Germany -- and again in the Cologne-based Express.

Richards, who has previously run teams in F1 for Benetton (1998) and Honda (2002-04), has made it clear he does not want his new team to be a fully-fledged constructor but rather to run "customer" cars -- and the indications increasingly are that McLaren-Mercedes will be the supplier of those cars.

Dennis has long been thought to be keen on having a McLaren ‘B' team, although he would not necessarily have to be a financial stakeholder. However, he and long-time associate Mansoeur Ojeh have even fatter wallets after both reduced their McLaren holdings from 30 to 15 per cent through the sale of shares to Bahrain recently.

Meanwhile, the customer-car row is hotting up, with Sir Frank Williams now going public about his opposition to the plans of Super Aguri and Scuderia Toro Rosso to run Honda and Red Bull Racing cars this season. Super Aguri's will be a 2006 Honda, while Toro Rosso's will be the latest Red Bull chassis with a Ferrari engine rather than a Renault.

Red Bull has put in place a corporate structure to try to avert the Toro Rosso being classified as a customer car, which some argue is not legal this year. Indeed, Sir Frank Williams claims customer cars are not a done deal for 2008.

Dutch-owned Spyker, which was previously Midland and originally Jordan, is the other strong opponent of customer cars in '07 and BMW is in the same camp. The row threatens to bubble on until the week of the season-opening Australian GP in mid-March, with indications from the FIA that it won't do anything either way until scrutineering in Melbourne.

Williams is threatening to take the issue to an international court of arbitration, but if it erupts in Melbourne it will need a prompt and practical solution. Otherwise we could have a version of something like the farce that was the six-car United States GP in 2005.

Hill wants to see characters
Lamenting the loss of the likes of Jacques Villeneuve and Eddie Irvine from the F1 ranks, 1996 world champion Damon Hill -- now chairman of the British Racing Drivers' Club, which runs the British GP -- says the sport must be conscious of keeping an "entertainment factor". Otherwise, Hill has told crash.net, it is "running the risk of begetting an assembly line of faceless automatons".