Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i AUTOSPORT

will.i.am? Well I never! The Miami Grand Prix promoters are determined to carve out a unique identity for this recent addition to the F1 calendar and the full-on assault of kitsch and celebrity cameos isn’t for everyone. This year’s event also presented us with a new format for the pre-race ceremonials, wherein the drivers were presented to the audience individually by the Grammy Award-winning rapper LL Cool J against a background tapestry featuring an honour guard of cheerleaders (whatever happened to the moratorium on grid girls?) and Black Eyed Peas founder will-i-am conducting a 30-piece orchestra. Naturally this attempt to ramp up the showbiz element met with a rebarbative response from the usual quarters. A mob of naysayers assembled on Twitter to bellow about this attempt to serve up change…

PICTURES 01 TOST SPREADS HIS WINGS AlphaTauri team boss to go after 17 years 02 MUSICAL CHAIRS AT MERC Allison returns in tech director job swap 03 NEW CONTRACT FOR NEWEY TOST OFF: NEW BOSS FOR ALPHATAURI 01 After 17 years at the helm of a Formula 1 team, Franz Tost is to step down from his role as team principal at AlphaTauri to make way for Laurent Mekies, currently racing director at Ferrari. It remains unclear, however, when exactly Mekies will be able to take up his duties at AlphaTauri’s Faenza base. The announcement of Tost’s imminent departure was made prematurely – in response to rumours leaked to the press of Mekies’ forthcoming move from Ferrari to AlphaTauri. Initial reports of the Frenchman’s intention to leave the Maranello outfit had…

@benedwardstv PICTURES TRIPLE-HEADER SURPRISES ON THE CARDS? The first part of the F1 season has involved over 50,000 miles of travel for those flying back and forth from Europe to each event but, over the next three weeks, those journeys will be focused on countries virtually bordering each other with huge F1 history on their kerbs. The races at Imola, Monaco and Barcelona-Catalunya run back-to-back and each can provide unexpected results. Along with the UK, Italy is the only country to have hosted world championship events every year since they began in 1950 and, while Imola joined in a little later than Monza, it still has a deep heritage. It is the 60th anniversary of the first F1 race to be held around the Emilia-Romagna woodland, a non-championship event won…

FORMULA 1 INCREASINGLY FAVOURS the well-rehearsed. The implementation of a budget cap that trickles down to cover sick pay and catering makes it far harder for a team to sit idle as an inexperienced driver squanders points and precious pounds smearing their car into a wall. Employing a safer pair of hands behind the wheel slashes the likelihood of an upcoming upgraded front wing and revised floor edge having to be scrapped just so the accounts can stay in the black. See Haas flicking a 23-year-old Mick Schumacher after his second term in the top flight. The European F3 and FIA F2 champion arrived with a decent CV, but a 2022 charge dogged by two seven-figure car-snapping spills led management to get shot of him in favour of rescuing Nico…

PICTURES IT WAS AN “acoustic trigger”, as he puts it, which lured Andrea Stella, a student of La Sapienza University in Rome, into the Formula 1 world. He had dreamed of being part of it since he was a child, yet when the chance suddenly arose to work not just in Formula 1 but at Ferrari – Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari – Stella started to have second thoughts. “The reason I studied engineering and in particular aerodynamics is because, yes, I was definitely very interested if not properly passionate about Formula 1 from my childhood,” he tells GP Racing. “So, I wanted to set my educational path in a way that I could be ready one day to join F1. “I was working at the university for a PhD. And my…

MATT KEW Matt looks at how F1’s elder statesmen, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, have stayed at the top of their game (p30) ALEX KALINAUCKAS Autosport’s Grand Prix editor dives into the thorny question of what is going on at AlphaTauri in the post-Dietrich Mateschitz era (p40) OLEG KARPOV A busy month for Oleg is headlined by his exclusive interview with new McLaren team principal Andrea Stella (p52) MARK GALLAGHER Mark investigates how F1 teams are dealing with the needs of their employees, as the calendar continues to expand (p60) Thanks to Sophie Almeida, Harry Bull, James Lloyd, Clarisse Hoffmann, Stuart Morrison, Sophie Ogg, William Ponissi, Katharina Rees, Milly Stell, Tom Wood IS POWERED BY…

PICTURES THE HIDDEN SCIENCE OF BATTERY LIFE To many people a battery is a battery. They may differentiate between the lead acid batteries found in most road cars and the lithium batteries found in battery electric vehicles and also in Formula 1 cars, but few realise there are many different types of lithium ion batteries – each with different characteristics and costs. The history of lithium batteries is a relatively recent one and the result of cumulative work done in the USA, UK and Japan. This was recognised in 2019 with the award of the Nobel prize to Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino from those countries respectively. Before talking of the different types of battery it’s worth a quick look at how a battery works since this will indicate…

For the first time since 2019, you’ve started a new season in a new environment. How is the process of getting to know the team going? I must say, so far, I’m extremely happy with the way we’re getting to know each other, and the way that they welcomed me and tried to make me feel at home. It’s a big change, a lot of new faces, so it needs time to build a relationship with everyone. But it’s been quite natural, and things are becoming, let’s say, more and more flowing race by race. Laurent Rossi mentioned in one of his recent interviews that he was a bit surprised by your request to organise a visit to the engine facilities in Viry – since it’s something not many drivers…

PICTURES WHEN BERNIE ECCLESTONE sat down for dinner with Liberty Media’s Chase Carey and Sean Bratches at the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix, they enjoyed a wide-ranging talk with host Donald Mackenzie, head of CVC Capital, at that time the ultimate owner of Formula 1. In Manish Pandey’s documentary Lucky!, chronicling the life and times of the man who built the business of F1, Ecclestone reflects upon that pivotal meeting on Mackenzie’s yacht. “Business wasn’t discussed there at all,” he recalls. “I think what they really thought in the end, the bottom line, was simple. ‘Here we’ve got an 80-year-old guy that’s been running this company for 40 years. Imagine us, proper American business people, if we had the company what we could do’.” What Liberty could do was take everything…

PICTURES JOHN COOPER WOULD NOT HAVE understood any of it when told about the 2023 Australian Grand Prix and Document 04, reference Appendix H, Article 2.3.2. The only document familiar to the owner of the Cooper F1 team back in the day would have been a telex or telegram confirming his start and potential prize money. Otherwise, official paperwork did not exist – save for the occasional typed notice listing lap times and pinned to a board outside race control a couple of hours after practice had finished. Even then, this would be no more than formal confirmation of lap times recorded – usually with greater efficiency than official timekeepers – by F1 wives and girlfriends with their hand-held stopwatches. As for mentioning Appendix H, Article 2.3.2 to Cooper; you…

PICTURES @mattkewF1 facebook.com/gpracingonline A STEP TOO FAR WITH THE SPRINT FORMAT In this lucrative Liberty Media-owned era for Formula 1, it’s easier to foresee every round featuring a sprint race sooner than the format being scrapped altogether. Money talks, so a 57% boost to the TV audience curiously tuning in to watch a new qualifying shootout for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix versus 2022 means the revised schedule is here to stay. As such it’s a more efficient use of energy to seek to optimise the latest restructure instead of futilely lamenting its very existence. That begins with urging the FIA to close the silly loophole for the Saturday sprint qualifying that meant those who burned through their new tyre allocation come the end of Q2 could not then enter Q3.…

No kerbing their enthusiasm This was my first time at the Miami Grand Prix so I came in with no preconceptions about the circuit or where to go. The chicane was an area many of the drivers complained about last year but it does have a few things going for it visually: there’s an elevation change and the drivers have an incentive to spend as little time in it as possible, so they tend to ride the kerbs. I shot this from Turn 14 where the elevation change means you’re low relative to the car, so you can play with the foreground and background. A slow shutter speed adds to the sensation of movement and the right-front wheel in the air shows just how hard the driver is trying. Photographer…

@_markgallagher WHEN MORE ISN’T BETTER Formula 1’s a serious business. If it’s laughs you’re looking for I can recommend avoiding official press conferences, media briefings and interviews in the pen, where serious interviewers come up with serious questions to ask drivers who would rather be having a massage. While the Irish comedian Conor Moore can raise a laugh with his clever impersonations of drivers and team principals, F1 isn’t a popular topic with mainstream comedians. David Mitchell, star of TV comedies including The Mitchell & Webb Look, Upstart Crow and Would I Lie to You, positively hates it. So incensed was he by the boredom caused by watching the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix that he wrote a column about it in The Guardian. “Televised Formula 1 is the most eloquent…

PICTURES All dynasties fall. And when they do chaos and, historically, even bloodshed follows. Right now in Formula 1, a potential political thriller is in the offing, surrounding the succession plan of the company which owns one of the super-teams: Red Bull. But while any Game of Thrones-style bloodletting would be metaphorical only, even in the ‘Piranha Club’, some very famous motorsport names could already be facing the consequences of regime change. As with many past examples of great houses falling, this all started with a patriarch’s demise. Red Bull magnate Dietrich Mateschitz’s health had been declining for months before his death in October 2022; that sad development finally came on the Saturday of the US Grand Prix and yet visibly shocked even the infamously undemonstrative Max Verstappen. The next…

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