A news round of interesting stories doing laps in the F1 Paddock.
Mercedes are buying into Brawn
Or at least that the rumour thats going round. Why they’d want to do that? The answer is obvious – Mercedes get a stronger foothold into F1 and FOTA. Mercedes also gets their 3 pointed star on the Brawn GP car winning the races. Mercedes clear see Brawn GP as the team of the future and want a bigger stake. I like their strategy as they are clearly maximising their F1 investment at the fraction of the cost of what Toyota and BMW pay whilst achieving more in terms of media coverage. Brawn GP will obviously have a more secure future and Ross Brawn and Nick Fry can finally cash in on the shares they bought from Honda.
Badoer Blames the Media
A bit convenient really, but Luca “lookhow badyouare” Badoer can only blame himself. Yes the media are unkind but they only put the stories behind the hard numers i.e. the lap times, which do not lie. Sour grapes Luca, Sour grapes.
Massa says Jenson is losing it
Feilpe Massa is possibly right, as he observed Button at the start of the season was dominating, now that the fight is tougher – Jenson is losing his head. But as Martin Brundle mentioned – the pain of the loss at Spa should help Button regroup and put him psychologically ready for battle.
BMW turns to India to find buyers
A consortium of investors based in India are interested in plugging the $30 million odd funding gap to take the Sauber team off BMW. Apparently, Peter Sauber is fronting the $68 million funding himself which will help make the $90 million asking price BMW are demanding. The stipulation of such deal includes the buyers having enough money for the rest of the seasons through to 2012 so that it doesn’t come to bite Sauber after signing the Concorde agreement. But also for the new reinvented Sauber team to use the Swiss Indian driver Neel Jani who is highly rated and was a test driver in the Red Bull stable.
Tonio Liuzzi joins Force India
He hasn’t had much luck in his short F1 career, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good driver either. He’s beaten Michael Schumacher in karting and even overtook Michael Schumacher twice in his first lap of F1 racing in Imola. I think Tonio has taken a bad rap by being subject to the Red Bull politics where the RBR team favoured the Austrian Christian Klien of Tonio. Then he got sacked to make way for Bourdais despite showing up Vettel a few times. hopefully with a competitive Force India – he’ll be able to show his worth at Monza where the car is competitive at high speed circuits like Spa.