Inside the exhaust soap opera

What an entertaining weekend!

It all kicked off on Friday morning with lots of off-throttle exhaust blown diffuser squabbling. Going to Silverstone, we all assumed that things were going to be as Charlie Whiting suggested in Valencia: with the driver off the throttle, engines would be permitted throttles 10 per cent open at 12000rpm and 20 per cent open at 18000rpm. With the proviso that the FIA would have a look at its data from 2009 and if it discovered that greater throttle openings had been used then, without the trick exhausts, then dispensations could be made.

When we arrived, we discovered that Mercedes had claimed it needed to fuel on the over-run for reliability reasons, apparently to do with maintaining crank case pressure, and had been given permission to do so on four of the eight cylinders. Renault felt that it would be disadvantaged by that and had been allowed to run with 50 per cent throttle opening to compensate. Ferrari and Cosworth, unimpressed, had followed suit without permission. And so, on Friday morning, nobody ran as expected.

Chaos ensued and, between sessions, Whiting declared that Renault's 50 per cent dispensation would not apply after all. Technical men and team principals headed hither and thither, jaws set, myriad sheets of A4 in their hands.

Still, nobody knew who'd driven the mid-season amendment in the first place, even if among those with a bit of experience, Ross Brawn was favourite.

There was no proof behind such a belief, it was born simply of standing back and looking at the bigger picture. When you looked at which of 'the big four' teams was not having a lot of success, it was Mercedes. No evidence of substance therefore, purely circumstantial.

What's undeniable is that it was Williams and Adam Parr who had made the initial query, wanting clarification before spending substantial money with Cosworth on hot blowing. But in Formula 1 you can never be sure that he who shouts is not doing someone else's bidding. When you realised that without Renault's complaints, Mercedes would have been firing on the over-run with everyone else at 10-20 per cent throttle opening, you wondered anew about Ross.

As Christian Horner said on Sunday night, you had to have some sympathy for Whiting trying to pick his way through all this. But some didn't, believing it to be a can of worms that the FIA hadn't needed to open. Whiting could have been forgiven for borrowing Oliver Hardy's line, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into..."

Christian Horner and Martin Whitmarsh © Sutton

There was a lively spat, entirely dignified of course, between Horner on behalf of the Renault Party and Martin Whitmarsh on behalf of the Mercedes Party, in the Friday afternoon press conference.

There was a temporary interlude when the media centre was rocked by the revelation that News of the World was to close.

"I've got my story," someone joked, "Ron Dennis closes News of the World!"

Pardon?

"Well, if Ron hadn't wound Max up so much, Martin Brundle wouldn't have needed to say that in his opinion Spygate was a witch hunt," he laughed, "the Sunday Times wouldn't have been threatened with legal action by Mosley and Murdoch wouldn't have needed to get his News of the World heavies on the other side of the office to start digging dirt on Max..."

Interestingly, the Daily Telegraph reports that Mosley, not content with his £60,000 invasion of privacy damages (and who would be, in the circumstances?) from NOTW, has been bankrolling the less well-heeled in phone-hacking court actions against the paper. He has apparently established a fund allowing those who would not otherwise be able to consider taking on NOTW to file their papers and not risk ruin in the event that News International won.

I have to say that given the poisonous nature of goings on at the time, I always found it to be stretching the boundaries of belief that 'Woman E' happened to come home and say to her MI5 agent husband, 'Guess who I'm going to spank on Friday, darling!' And then had her other half - trained in discretion and secrecy, obviously - sell the story to the 'News of the Screws'! For not very much. The credibility of that is stretched yet further by the recent phone-hacking revelations.

National newspaper writers and radio/TV commentators were wondering how in the hell they were meant to make exhaust blown diffusers interesting and some were gravely asking, whether the sport was once again shooting itself in the foot and risking the great switch-off.

Up in the BBC Radio Five Live commentary box, 87-year-old Murray Walker was guesting and couldn't have disagreed more. No, he said, this was F1's life-blood, all part of it, always has been and always will be. With little prompting he was soon reminiscing about the Kyalami drivers strike and Elio de Angelis's piano playing.

On Friday we couldn't be distracted by relative performances on-track because it was raining. By Saturday afternoon though, we knew that Ferrari was quick. Red Bull's traditional chasm of an advantage at Silverstone was down to a few hundredths of a second. And we'd seen season-best qualifying performances from Paul di Resta's Force India-Mercedes (sixth on the grid), Pastor Maldonado's Williams-Cosworth (seventh) and Sergio Perez's Sauber-Ferrari (eighth).

There was a certain logic to that if you believed those who thought that Mercedes would gain relative to Renault and that the smaller teams, like Force India, Williams and Sauber, that weren't in the vanguard of exhaust-blowing, would gain relatively more by its absence.

The big advance though, was obviously Ferrari's. Post-race Stefano Domenicali said he didn't know how much of that was down to the revised regulations, but Pat Fry believed that the big aero upgrade (which included a new floor, top body, rear wing and exhaust layout) was much more significant.

On Saturday evening the FIA put out a release informing us that if the teams were unanimous in their agreement, F1 could revert to the Valencia rules (i.e. no special qualifying engine maps but full blown diffusers) from Nurburgring for the rest of the year. Around the paddock the feeling was that there was more chance of finding a snowball in the Sahara than achieving unanimity on that. A technical meeting was, however, set up for 10.30am Sunday in order to try to achieve it.

In the meantime, given the proximity of Fernando Alonso to the Red Bulls we looked in danger of having a motor race, although the home heroes were unlikely to be in it. Jenson Button's McLaren had qualified fifth, 1.5s off the pace, and Lewis Hamilton was 10th, fully 2s away.

Again, there was a questionable strategic approach with Lewis, who had been sent out for his first Q3 run on used option Pirellis. The thinking was that the second runs would be quicker and that saving fresh rubber was the best approach. That was risky though, because it involved second-guessing the weather radars and, sure enough, rain wiped out the second runs. Hamilton, once again, was not a happy bunny.

When it was time for McLaren's 'Meet the Team' Saturday press briefing, Martin Whitmarsh knew what was coming. To pre-empt the flak, rather than throwing questions open to the floor, he took the microphone and gave a rousing address that went on for a good few minutes.

The gist of it was that, yes, the team let Lewis down this afternoon. We think the rule revisions have hurt us quite a lot. We're in the poo, we know we're in the poo, but there's no team in the paddock better at getting out of it than this team. And that is what we'll do. Please don't bore the hell out of us about it. We'll fight them on the beaches, etc.

All the while, Hamilton twiddled around with his mobile phone while Button sat back on his stool with a look of admiration on his face.

Whitmarsh gave Button some inspiration © LAT

When Whitmarsh had finished, Button almost applauded and, with a broad smile, said, "What a great speech - very Churchillian!"

"More like Hitler in the bunker," whispered a press man with a sense of humour.

The McLaren team principal was certainly right about the fact that his drivers don't know how to give up. McLaren looked better on Sunday but was still a second away from the ultimate pace. They must certainly be hoping for a return to Valencia spec.

At the minute - this particular minute at any rate - it looks as if that's what we will get. The Sunday morning meeting did not achieve unanimity because Ferrari and Sauber (which of course uses Ferrari engines) wanted some extra time to think things over.

You might reasonably have expected that Ferrari's win would have sealed that lack of unanimity and that things would be staying as they are. But no, what was this, Domenicali confirmed that Ferrari, for the good of the sport, had agreed!

It might not have happened 10 years ago but it seemed to be happening now. But hang on a minute. Ferrari could afford to be magnanimity personified if they knew someone else wasn't going to agree. Time to go and door-step Peter Sauber...

Sauber, strangely, would not confirm whether his team had given agreement or not.

"After Montreal the FIA said this system is illegal and we change it," he offered. "And then we have a lot of discussion about saving the engine and all this rubbish. Everybody was looking out for himself, which is normal."

Peter Sauber didn't give anything away © LAT

But had he signed for the Valencia spec?

"I was not in the meeting."

So, had his team signed?

"You can ask me 10 times and I don't give you an answer to this."

Read into that what you will.

According to Bernie Ecclestone on the grid, however, agreement had been forthcoming and Sauber himself did concede that what Mr E says is usually correct, so expect a return to Valencia spec exhaust blowing at the Nurburgring. I think...

If there isn't signed unanimity of course, and we do go back, the results will be open to protest. Williams was the original objector but, since then, it's inked a Renault engine deal and Renault will certainly want to back to Valencia spec.

There were initially concerns about Colin Kolles and Hispania, who could presumably smell some money via a protest. Since then, however, they will have had some Red Bull cash to take Daniel Ricciardo and, have discovered that thanks to Geoff Willis, a blown floor on a Hispania makes them a big nuisance to Virgin which, realistically, is the only team they are racing.

I'm told, incidentally, that Virgin wrote a letter on Friday night saying that it was not in favour of going back to the Valencia rules. Presumably because, as someone put it a bit cattily, on that chassis it won't make any difference whether you've got a blown exhaust or a hair drier at the back.

The really, really, really Machiavellian conspiracy theorists suggest that Whiting, although he works for the FIA, has always been an Ecclestone man, and that after the problems over Bahrain and the 2013 engine regs, wouldn't it be a right bugger's muddle and even more embarrassing for Jean Todt and the FIA if nobody knew who'd won any of the races. But that probably is way too far-fetched.

On top of it all, we had another Red Bull team orders rumpus. But that's another story. Forget Brookside or Corrie - Murray's right, for a good soap, you can't beat F1!