Motorsport: Splitter decision -- not illegal, but out

In essence, it is that the front air splitters on the Falcons built by Triple Eight Race Engineering -- that's the Team Vodafone cars of Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes, and the five provided to three other teams -- up until last Saturday have not been illegal, but that they will no longer be allowed.

The mounts are to be changed -- made rigid -- for the next round of the championship at Symmons Plains in Tasmania at the end of this month.

Triple 8 would argue that they were made rigid for Sunday's 200km Winton race.

V8 Supercar category technical director Campbell Little -- who, remember, used to work for Triple 8 before joining V8 Supercar Australia -- emailed all team managers this week.

His note said: "V8 Supercar carried out a detailed investigation into the issues surrounding the front bumper bar mounting of numerous cars raced at Winton last weekend.

"We found that several teams are using 'semi-rigid' bumper bar mount systems, due to design or material choice; also lightweight front bumper bars which were manufactured to yield, and that this was not illegal under our current regulations.

"The outcome is that a recommendation will go to the technical board to clarify the regulations for the rigid mounting of front splitters and rear wing, and that a minimum weight of these components should be introduced. Further details will follow."

We've been amazed how quiet this row has been in public this week. It made some headlines Sunday night and Monday morning, but after that it was silence.

Imagine a similar storm in one of the football codes or cricket. That's where motor racing -- even V8 Supercars, which lays claim to being a mainstream or "heartland" sport -- lacks traction.

Anyway, there's some official movement on the matter now and that may settle things.

Before we leave the subject, we must commend our related publication Auto Action for its lead news story this week on what its editor-at-large Mark Fogarty called "shock-absorbing splitters". Things have moved on since that story was written on Monday, but Fogarty encapsulated the issue well, detailing the essence of the complaint(s) -- N.B. there were no protests -- as well as Triple 8 boss Roland Dane's defence, which in the previous reports we saw took prominence.

Saying that, most other teams had called for the flexible attachment to be banned, and that they were not so much worried about it at a track like Winton as they were on street circuits (and, we now hear, Bathurst), Fogarty wrote: "They (T8's rivals) believe the device's real advantage is at tracks with car-killing kerbs like Adelaide and Hamilton (in New Zealand).

"They are convinced it enables the Hogsters' (the Team Vodafone Falcons display the Hog's Breath café mascot instead of Ford's blue oval emblem) front ride height to be lower, increasing the downforce generated by the aerodynamic undertray, because they can crash over kerbs without destroying their splitters.

"The springs compress on impact, allowing the front bar to absorb the blow without destroying the splitter. The same system is (now was) fitted to the T8-built FGs run by Dick John Racing and Paul Cruickshank Racing and also Marcus Marshall's BF."

While we felt that Roland Dane's defence got more airplay and column inches than the complaint(s), we will reiterate his view as recounted in Fogarty's article.

"It's a splitter-saving device. We have nothing to hide. We've been running it for four years. We did it to save money. It doesn't move under braking or anything."

Dane claimed that the change to fixed mountings for Sunday's Winton race was voluntary. And, of course, Whincup still qualified on pole and Lowndes won the race.

But the article ends by quoting the boss of a Holden team saying the shock-absorbing splitter "is (now was) a huge advantage at tracks like Adelaide and Hamilton."

All teams are expected to have quite major changes to their cars after the four "flyaway" races -- in Australia, Malaysia, China and Bahrain -- which have seen the traditional F1 order shuffled, with Brawn (nee Honda), Toyota and Red Bull the pacesetters.

Although BMW-Sauber, which has been the biggest disappointment of the season to date, reportedly has a major update for Barcelona, it won't fit a double diffuser (nor will Red Bull, we believe) -- and apparently BMW won't run KERS (the troublesome Kinetic Energy Recovery System) on either Robert Kubica or Nick Heidfeld's cars.

We saw a description somewhere this week of the Barcelona race generally being "one of the traditional snore-fests of F1" but the rule changes have given the sport a much-needed makeover and the interest will now be in whether traditional heavyweights Ferrari and McLaren can match the upstarts who have held sway to date.

For Australian fans and supporters of Red Bull's Aussie driver Mark Webber (pictured), his latest thoughts, expressed in his regular column for the BBC, are more here.

New Zealand teenager Brendon Hartley will be Red Bull's reserve driver from this weekend. The 19-year-old Hartley won Formula Renault's European championship in 2007 and has since raced in Formula 3 with Carlin Motorsport -- last year in Britain, where he finished third in the championship, and this year on the European continent. 

He is one of the eight youngsters in Red Bull's development squad to unearth F1 drivers, along with Australia's Daniel Ricciardo, who is leading the British F3 series this year for Carlin. Hartley was named for the F1 reserve driver role some time back but has only recently been granted the necessary superlicence.

In other F1 news, the governing Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) has made it official that there will be space for three new teams -- or six cars -- on next year's grid, potentially returning the field to the 26 it ought to be (and which was a cornerstone of the early years of Bernie Ecclestone's reign as F1's ringmaster).

Some potential candidates for those spots are already well-known -- the proposed new US team and another from Prodrive/David Richards. But this week even Japan's Aguri Suzuki, who branded (or reiterated) F1 as "a club full of piranhas" when his Super Aguri team folded a year ago has said that he might be back.

Lots of other politicking going on in F1, as usual. One comment piece we came across this week that readers might enjoy was on the London Guardian website, and the author took the view that losing the British GP next year would be preferable to giving Ecclestone millions of state money and calling him "the only man in the world who thinks it takes US$25 million to hold a GP". That blog -- and we couldn't see the author's name, which may be just as well!!! -- is here.

We doubted here earlier this week a claim attributed to Ecclestone that the TV audiences for the GPs so far this year -- including the twilight races in Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur -- were up 300 per cent on last year.

Our European TV expert reports: "For the 2009 Bahrain GP, with heavy Jenson Button-Lewis Hamilton attraction for British viewers, the peak UK audience on BBC1 for the Sunday broadcast around midday was 4.39 million viewers -- a solid number and up from the 3.58 million of the 2008 Bahrain race on former British telecaster ITV. That's an increase of about 22 per cent in the market that would be rightly consumed by Button's success. Not sure that Ferrari's under-performance would be generating a 22 per cent increase in Italy, though. A 300 per cent increase would make the UK number over 10 million, but there's no sign of that. As we saw a few weeks earlier, (see here) the Melbourne numbers in the UK were down on 2008, and Malaysia up, so perhaps there has been some small overall increase for the year to date -- 15 per cent up might be a generous guess. This Sunday's first European race in Barcelona will be a good comparison."

Mosley -- who has another son, Patrick, 37 -- has cancelled his planned visit to the Spanish GP this weekend.

And, on the subject of drugs, we hear that two drag racers were banned on that score at last weekend's meeting at West Sydney dragway.

There's a day of qualifying for pole position at The Brickyard this Saturday, with drivers making four-lap runs of the 2.5-mile (4km) oval. The first 11 places on the 33-car grid will be locked in at the end of this day, while there will be three more qualifying days to decide the other 22 starters.

There are 41 entries chasing 33 spots at this stage, with the prospect of more still -- so there could be some serious "bumping" at the end of qualifying as desperate late runs are made to secure a place on the grid and knock others out.

The Indy 500 is billed as the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. To us the Bathurst 1000 takes some topping, but Indy -- and the Daytona 500 -- are two of the very best offerings from the States.

And this year there are two Australian drivers -- Ryan Briscoe and Will Power -- at The Brickyard, both with Team Penske -- the most successful outfit in the history of the event.

Before the end of May we could have an Aussie winner of the world's biggest open-wheeler race. We'll keep tabs on our boys there this month, and for starters an interview with Ryan Briscoe is here.

And, while it's the 93rd Indy 500, this year is the 100th birthday of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, see here.

A preview of this week's round at Darlington Raceway -- described as "The track too tough to tame" -- from the Michael Waltrip Racing team, under whose umbrella Ambrose races (although his entry is by JTG Daugherty Racing), talks of the dual Australian V8 Supercar champion "knocking on the door of the top-12 drivers vying for a coveted spot in The Chase" (to decide the champion at the end of the season).

Ambrose is 19th in the standings, but points out that he's "only 120 points out of 12th place".

"We are outperforming our expectations," he says.

"We just wanted to run well. We never expected to be in this position. We are not getting carried away either."

Nor should they be. He may be only 120 points off 12th, but -- more importantly -- he's seven places off 12th. That's seven drivers he's got to climb over to get into that top 12. But there is no dampening the Ambrose camp's excitement.

"All things considered, we have done well so far," he says.

"We've just had a few reliability issues that have kept us out of the top 12 in points. We are good on short tracks, superspeedways and intermediate tracks.

"We're doing well on all of them. I honestly thought short tracks were going to be an issue for me to get up to speed to learn because I hadn't raced a Cup car on a short track or even superspeedways for that matter. However, we've had our best results at those places.

"We had a solid finish at Richmond (Virginia, last weekend), but we were crashed. We came back to have a decent finish considering all that we faced.

"You can bash those cars around and even back them into the fence and they will keep moving. We had good moments and bad moments, but we bounced back from adversity and almost got another top 10."

And, if Ambrose is happy with how he's doing, Mike Lovecchio has had some complimentary things to say about him on American motor racing site frontstretch.com.

Under the heading of "Tasmanian Surprise", Lovecchio wrote: "Marcos Ambrose, the Tasmanian-born former Australian V8 Supercars star is making noise in his first full year as a Cup driver for JTG Daugherty Racing. Though not eligible for rookie of the year due to his 11 Cup starts last season, Ambrose has outperformed this year's rookie class with eight top 25s in 10 races. If anybody tells you they expected this type of start from Ambrose, they're lying ... nobody did. The amazing thing about it all is that he's showing no signs of slowing down, either, despite the fact we haven't even made it to his best tracks: the road courses at Sonoma (in California) and Watkins Glen (in New York).

"Will Ambrose be able to continue this momentum throughout the season? That remains to be seen -- but you can't help but be impressed with his driving talent."

The outfit behind Ambrose is JTG Daugherty Racing. JTG is the acronym for Jodi and Tad Geschickter, who have backed the Australian since he moved to the US four years ago. Brad Daugherty is a former basketball star turned TV commentator. More on him here.

It's one for rallying's true believers, as the international competitors are little known to Australians -- except for Cody Crocker, the Aussie who has won a string of APRC titles after great success in the ARC -- and the national championship is in a sorry state.

We mentioned here a couple of weeks ago rising star Brendan Reeves, who we note will have experienced co-driver Glen Weston alongside him this weekend in a left-hand-drive Subaru WRX STi he has acquired from mentor Les Walkden.

The 20-year-old Reeves' sister Rhianon Smyth has been his regular co-driver, but she now teams up with ace New Zealand driver Emma Gilmour in the six-round APRC. Reeves and Weston will contest the Pirelli Star Driver component of Rally Queensland.

The top two placegetters in the Pirelli Star Driver competition will get the opportunity to compete for the Asia-Pacific title at Australia's new round of the World Rally Championship in northern NSW in September. The winner of the Asia-Pacific title then wins a fully-funded entry in six rounds of the 2010 Production WRC.

Meanwhile, there are plans for an endurance event to be added to next year's ARC. According to a report in Auto Action this week, it is likely to be run between Sydney and Melbourne via Canberra. Australian Rally Commission chairman Colin Trinder said it was intended to have up to 400km of competition -- about twice a normal ARC round.

The plan is that this event be held in the years that Rally Australia is not on under the new WRC rotation system for events.

And Trinder said it may not always be the same route.

"We need to revamp the ARC with some different events to mix up the interest in the series," he said.

Photos courtesy Team Vodafone and Photo-4.com.

Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at www.carsales.mobi