MOTORSPORT: Time for FIA consistency

Motorsport reportNovember 13, 2007

Will Renault get a McLaren-like penalty?
There had been rumors in Formula 1 circles for weeks, before Renault was ordered late last week to appear before the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) on December 6, that the "Spygate" scandal was a whole lot bigger than the Ferrari dossier for which McLaren was heavily penalised.

Renault is to be probed over information on "the layout and critical dimensions of the McLaren F1 car" brought to it by former McLaren engineer Phil Mackereth.

FIA president Max Mosley said two months ago that the governing body had seen a dossier from Renault "which doesn't look particularly damning", but last Thursday's FIA announcement refers to "details of the McLaren fuelling system, gear assembly, oil cooling system, hydraulic control system and a novel suspension component used by the 2006 and 2007 McLaren F1 cars".

Some reports since the move last week against Renault have quoted an "insider" saying that "the amount and depth of the information (in this latest case) makes 'Stepneygate' (the allegations about McLaren's possession of Ferrari documents) look like a walk in the park".

Mosley is seen as having been exceptionally heavy-handed on McLaren in the FIA's fining of that team US$100 million and stripping it of all its points in this year's constructors' championship which it otherwise would have won.

The test now is whether Mosley and the FIA's world motorsport council are prepared to be as tough on Renault, or what excuses are provided if that council is not as severe on the French manufacturer.

The Renault hearing in Paris will be the day before findings are due to be announced after an FIA inspection of designs of the 2008 McLaren-Mercedes.

This inspection, which almost coincided with the confirmation of the Renault probe, was painted in the media as a "swoop" on the McLaren factory, but it was always part of the outcome of the earlier FIA decision -- that next year's McLaren would be progressively checked to ensure it does not incorporate anything from the infamous Ferrari dossier.

Renault, which did not win a race this year after world titles in 2005 and '06, has tried hard to play down the seriousness of the charge it faces of having unauthorised McLaren information.

It has said that the information Mackereth brought from McLaren was "contained on old-style floppy discs and included copies of some McLaren engineering drawings and some technical spreadsheets".

"This information was loaded at the request of Mr Mackereth on to his personal directory on the Renault F1 Team file system," it said. "This was done without the knowledge of anyone in authority in the team."

Renault said the information was cleansed from its computer systems as soon as the matter was brought to its attention and a formal investigation started, and that McLaren and the FIA were kept fully informed throughout while the discs were impounded and returned to McLaren via lawyers.

"Our formal investigation showed that early in his employment with Renault, Mr Mackereth made some of our engineers aware of parts of this information in the form of a few reduced scale engineering drawings," Renault said.

"These drawings covered four basic systems as used by McLaren and were the internal layout of the fuel tank, the basic layout of the gear clusters, a tuned mass damper and a suspension damper."

The mention of mass damper rouses suspicions. That was a feature outlawed in F1 last year, having been introduced by Renault.

Contrary to Renault's downplaying of the Mackereth matter, recent European reports suggest an independent investigation, instigated by McLaren, revealed information bearing McLaren logos on seven computer terminals in the Renault design department.

The FIA and F1 commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone are often seen as favoring Ferrari, particularly over McLaren.

Ecclestone is believed to have been concerned throughout the year about the potential damage of espionage on the commercial aspects of F1.

He is particularly close to Renault F1 team principal Flavio Briatore. Apart from their motor sport association, the pair recently bought an English soccer club together.

There are suspicions, fears, call them what you like, that a way will be found to ensure Renault does not cop penalties as harsh as McLaren did.

Compounding matters, in this instance the FIA is dealing with a team wholly-owned by a motor manufacturer, not a private team (McLaren) partly owned by a manufacturer (Mercedes-Benz) that also supplies its engines.

Ecclestone called an emergency meeting of F1 teams in London after the FIA moved against Renault.

The Daily Telegraph reported that all teams other than Renault, Ferrari and McLaren attended Ecclestone's meeting, to "establish the nature and full extent of espionage within F1 and cut out the cancer at source".

The Times has reported that Renault invited independent experts appointed by McLaren to visit its headquarters to investigate what had happened to Mackereth's data, but the Kroll security firm was said to have made only a short visit on McLaren's behalf and simply taken back the relevant disks.

However, The Times said there were other published versions of what was found, suggesting the Kroll team examined the hard drives of the Renault computer system and that a dossier sent to the FIA by McLaren included at least 15 statements from Renault engineers admitting that they had discussed the material brought by Mackereth.

Briatore has said he is confident that Renault will not be punished, and is leaning on there not have been a continious flow of information -- as there was from Ferrari's disgruntled Nigel Stepney to McLaren's chief designer Mike Coughlan in "Stepneygate".

That may be one point, but it might be going to take all of Mosley's brilliant intellect to explain away how Renault escapes heavy sanction, if indeed it does, while McLaren copped what most observers believe to be much more than its fair whack in the previous case.

An irony in all of this is that Briatore lamented, after the FIA hit McLaren with the big stick, that the McLaren drivers were not penalised as well.

On the basis of what is already known, Briatore could be about to find himself in the unenviable position that his McLaren counterpart Ron Dennis did a couple of months ago.

Yet, in the politics of F1, it is hard to imagine similar penalties on Briatore.

Even harder to imagine is car manufacturer Renault accepting them, or certainly remaining in F1 if they come.

Bourdais may get 'parked' in IRL
Sebastien Bourdais won the final round of the Champ Car series in Mexico ahead of Will Power after the Aussie claimed pole position, despite still nursing two hairline fractures in his left wrist from the Gold Coast Indy.

Power was on the podium for the fifth time this year, and he had five pole positions. He led in Mexico until Bourdais passed him on lap 23.

The Frenchman pulled away until a full-course caution on lap 55 allowed Power to close up behind him for a restart, but Bourdais sped away again to take his eighth win of the season – and the 31st of his Champ Car career, equaling the tally of Mario Andretti.

In 73 starts in the category Bourdais has finished on the podium 44 times. He gained a lot of admirers in his five years with what is now Newman Haas Lanigan Racing, and his final victory came despite a restriction on how much he could use his push-to-pass button in Mexico after laying rubber in his pit "box" during the race morning warm-up.

Bourdais is meant to be heading off to Formula 1 now and, indeed, is testing with his new team, Scuderia Toro Rosso (the second Red Bull F1 outfit), in Barcelona for three days next week.

"He's the best and most complete race driver I've ever raced against," Power said. "He's very technical and very good on the engineering side of things. He's been the pacesetter for four years in Champ Car, and he really deserves an F1 chance, and I think he's going to do a really good job there."

However, if Fernando Alonso declines the offer to return to Renault and picks Red Bull instead, there is going to have to be a reshuffle.

Red Bull already has Australia's Mark Webber and veteran David Coulthard under contract for next year, while Toro Rosso has young German star Sebastien Vettel and Bourdais signed.

We hear that if Red Bull can snare Alonso it will steer Coulthard over to Toro Rosso and buy an Indy Racing League team and park Bourdais in it for a year until it has another F1 vacancy.

Meanwhile, Power has wound up fourth in the Champ Car series in his second year in it. He finished sixth in his rookie season last year.

Justin Wilson finished runner-up in the series for the second year in a row, while Dutchman Robert Doornbos ended up third, driving for expatriate Australian Paul Stoddart's Team Minardi USA, and set the fastest lap in Mexico despite doing only 12 laps in the race and having four pit stops.

The young Perkins, in his first full season in the big league of national racing with his father's team, will miss the remaining rounds of the V8 championship at Tasmania's Symmons Plains this weekend and then the finale at Victoria's Phillip Island.

Versatile part-timer Marcus Marshall will fill the seat for those two rounds.

Perkins requires daily insulin injections for the time being, but said: "What happens next year is a bit of an unknown at this stage, but plenty of advances are being made on the diabetes front so I am optimistic that I can resume racing in the near future."

Cochrane still ruling V8 roost
After all the talk mid-year of moves to oust him as the chairman of V8 Supercar racing, Tony Cochrane has held on to his post. He has done that seemingly with the unanimous support of TEGA, the Touring Car Entrants Group which represents the sport's 17 teams.

Cochrane has shown himself to be a master at playing the politics that have seen him head off former federal Liberal Party leader John Hewson before he ever even got to mount a serious challenge.

TEGA's day-to-day chief Kelvin O'Reilly's board seat has been abolished. O'Reilly has been under mysterious suspension for a couple of weeks now. Word is he has been offered a settlement to cut short his recently-renewed contract but may be holding out for a better departure package.

The Holden representatives on the new TEGA board are Larry Perkins and, somewhat surprisingly, Paul Morris, while the Ford representatives are Ross Stone, co-owner of Stone Brothers Racing, and Tim Edwards, head of Ford Performance Racing.

These four join independent chairman, Adelaide businessman Roger Cook, as the TEGA representatives on the board of V8 Supercars Australia -- which is 75 per cent owned by TEGA and 25 per cent by Sports Entertainment Ltd, a company controlled by Cochrane and James Erskine.

One of the first jobs for the new TEGA board is finalising a new Team's Licence Agreement, followed by a restructuring that will see a single board for TEGA and V8 Supercars Australia.

The V8 races at next year's GP -- in the middle of March -- will take on even more of a Holden-versus-Ford twist.

Once pole position is decided, all the other cars of that make will grid up directly behind that car, with the other make on the other side of the grid.

Points will be awarded to the rival manufacturers in each V8 race, with the winning make perhaps not known until the whole field completes the last race.

The V8 races at the GP don't count towards the season's Supercar championship, so anything that might inject some extra meaning into them has got to be worth a try.

Brawn took a year's sabbatical from Ferrari this season and it had first call on his services, but it seems a suitable position could not be agreed for him to return.

Brawn reportedly had been in the sights of Red Bull Racing, perhaps as part of a package with dual world champion driver Fernando Alonso, now free from McLaren.

There is a possibility that Alonso could yet end up at Honda, although Renault, Red Bull and even Toyota could be ahead of it in the race for his services.

Meanwhile, Jenson Button, who has had to take a back seat in the affections of British F1 fans since the stunning arrival on the scene of Lewis Hamilton, gave Honda a richly-deserved spray over its performance this year ahead of the Brawn announcement.

Button won the 2006 Hungarian GP for Honda but after scoring just six points this year, and Brazilian teammate Rubens Barrichello none, the Englishman said the Japanese manufacturer's '07 car was "a complete dog -- just shocking".

"I'm just not interested in racing like this any more," Button told London's Mail on Sunday newspaper. Button said Honda had pinpointed the problem as an aerodynamics issue, but warned he would leave the team at the end of next year if things don't improve.

The veteran German, winner of six GPs and brother of seven-time world champion and 91-time GP victor Michael, was dropped by the Toyota team after three fruitless seasons but is set to test soon for Force India at Jerez in Spain.

Evans, Toyota clean sweep in ARC
Husband-and-wife Simon and Sue Evans went through the formality of completing a clean sweep of the Australian Rally Championship at the weekend's season-ending Rally of Melbourne, sealing driver, co-driver and manufacturer titles for them and Toyota for the second year in a row.

The combination won all 12 heats and six rounds in their Group N prototype Corolla in what is a sadly-diminished ARC.

Mitsubishi privateer Spencer Lowndes wound up second overall for the weekend in Melbourne in an Evolution IX Lancer with Chris Randell as co-driver, while Toyota team boss Neal Bates and Coral Taylor were third in their Super 2000 Corolla.

After multiple punctures and a holed sump in Saturday's first heat, Ford's Michael Guest won four of Sunday's eight stages in his S2000 Fiesta to end the day just 11 seconds behind the Evans Corolla, with Lowndes another 15.5 seconds back -- and 50 seconds ahead of Bates.

There are bright prospects emerging like Victorian youngster Brendan Reeves, driving a Subaru for Les Walkden Rallying, and South Australian Brett Kipling in an Evolution V Mitsubishi Lancer, but unfortunately the series has almost fallen off the map in Australian motor sport.

NEC Australian Rally Championship final standings -- Simon Evans (Toyota) 524.5 points, Neal Bates (Toyota) 368, Dean Herridge (Subaru privateer) 264, Michael Guest (Ford) 228, Spencer Lowndes (Mitsubishi privateer) 228, Brendan Reeves (Subaru privateer) 182.

Crocker adds to trophy cabinet
Australian Cody Crocker's victory in the weekend's Rally of China is his fifth of the year in the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship with co-driver Ben Atkinson, brother of WRC star Chris -- and gives them the title for the second year in a row.

This year they have been driving a Subaru Impreza WRX STI for Singapore's Motor Image team, after last year driving for Tasmanian-based Les Walkden Rallying.

Dean Herridge and Bill Hayes were the early leaders in China but retired with a broken gearbox in their Subaru.

The event appears to have been something of a farce, with most of the top cars out on the second day amid some form of fuel contamination.

Subaru has again won the manufacturers' title in the championship, although Mitsubishi won in New Caledonia and Indonesia.

Crocker and Atkinson won five of the six rounds they contested this year, and have now taken top points in 11 of the 12 APRC events they have run in over the past two years.

And Crocker has won nine of the 10 championships he has contested -- four Group N Australian Rally Championships from 1998 to 2001, three outright ARC titles from 2003 to 2005, and now two straight APRC titles.

Irish rally something quite different
It's the penultimate round of the world rally championship this weekend, with Rally Ireland a new addition to the series -- and promising tricky conditions on roads that are very narrow and often damp.

Australia's Subaru factory driver Chris Atkinson says: "The surface is half asphalt and half gravel, which means we have to use an unique setup.

"We actually set the car up for the wet to get the compromise between the two surfaces, and the high chance of rain. Rather than when the asphalt gets wet and slippery, it's when the asphalt is totally dry that you lose time."

Subaru team manager Paul Howard says to expect "a similar rate of attrition" to that at the previous round in Japan.

The rally will be based in the small west coast town of Sligo, about 200km from Belfast.

A short spectator stage in Belfast will be the only stage of the year on which the lead WRC cars will start in the dark.

Sainz now a triple world champion
Carlos Sainz, winner of the world rally championship in 1990 and '92, has now won the FIA Cross-Country Rally World Cup.

The Spanish legend has been with Volkswagen as a factory driver since 2005.

"These rounds are much longer and incredibly tougher," says Sainz, who is now preparing to drive his Touareg powered by a 280-horsepower 2.5-litre TDI engine in the 30th Dakar Rally, which starts on January 5 in Lisbon, Portugal, and ends -- after about 9,000km on January 20, in Senegal.

Ambrose tops the $1 million mark
According to the Marcos Ambrose camp, the dual V8 Supercar champion's earnings in NASCAR's Busch Series this year have now topped A$1 million.

After Ambrose's 15th place in his Wood Brothers/JTG Racing.Ford Fusion at the penultimate round of the 35-race series at Phoenix International Raceway at the weekend his season earnings are posted as US$951,220 or A$1,040,728.

He is now back up to eighth in the championship going into this week's final round at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida.

NASCAR Busch Series standings after 34 races -- Carl Edwards 4640 points, David Reutimann 4069, Jason Leffler 3875, Kevin Harvick 3868, David Ragan 3670, Bobby Hamilton Junior 3525, Stephen Leicht 3443, Marcos Ambrose 3343, Greg Biffle 3316, Matt Kenseth 3311.

Johnson poised for NASCAR title again
Reigning NASCAR Nextel Cup champion Jimmie Johnson is in the box seat for back-to-back titles after four straight wins in the long series -- a feat not achieved since his main rival Jeff Gordon did it in 1998.

Johnson is 86 points ahead of Gordon going into the final round this weekend at Homestead and needs only finish 18th to clinch another crown. Gordon has all but conceded defeat.

If Johnson were to win the Homestead race he would equal the five NASCAR race wins in a row of "King" Richard Petty.

Kinetic energy recovery a big winner
A brake regeneration system intended for use in Formula 1 -- and more formally called kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) -- has won the engine innovation of the year at the Professional MotorSport World Expo Awards in Cologne, Germany.

Developed by three British companies -- Flybrid, Torotrak and Xtrac -- the fast-acting flywheel system reportedly is as much as twice as efficient as existing hybrid electric vehicles in the storage of recovered vehicle kinetic energy.

Dream Penske drive for Briscoe
It's official now that Australian Ryan Briscoe will return to the Indy Racing League next year with the mighty Penske Racing.

Briscoe replaces Sam Hornish Junior, a Penske favorite who is switching to NASCAR -- although he has only just qualified for a start in the big league of American stock car racing after six failures.

Briscoe, a former European Formula 3 champion and F1 test driver for Toyota, raced in the IRL in 2005 for Chip Ganassi -- but that relationship came to an end after his horrific crash at Chicagoland in what made some of the most spectacular TV footage in motor sport history but left him with many broken bones.

This year Briscoe notched three wins driving a Porsche sports car for Penske in the American Le Mans Series, as well as finishing fifth in the Indianapolis 500 for a team jointly owned by Penske's youngest son, Jay.

Briscoe joins Brazilian two-time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves in the Penske open-wheeler team that has a record 14 wins at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and 134 race victories and 11 titles in the two major North American-based open-wheeler series -- the IRL and Champ Car.

Gore in battle with taxman
Craig Gore, owner of Champ Car and V8 Supercar teams and co-founder of founded the Wright Patton Shakespeare property and finance group, has been taken to court over a $27,000 income tax bill for the 2005 financial year, according to a report in the Weekend Australian.

The report said the lawsuit is part of a series of disputes that Gore and his companies are facing from the tax office, and which the entrepreneur admits involve "many, many millions of dollars".

The suit reportedly includes a further claim for $713,630 in penalties related to the failure of Wright Patton Shakespeare Financial Services to pay withholding taxes in the first six months of last year.

The paper said it is believed the money relates to the income tax of employees.

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