Dodgy Business

Hello from Jerez in Spain, where the wail of F1 engines was music to the ears of anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms over the Christmas break.

In reality, it's only three weeks since the test teams signed off for 2005 at Jerez, and with the freight leaving for Bahrain in a few short weeks, everyone bar Midland F1 and Super Aguri is blasting around the Spanish track in anger again this week.

Anger, for some, is appropriate enough. As you might expect, the news that Renault was losing Fernando Alonso to McLaren in 2007 did not sit well with many of those at Enstone.

I'm afraid I can't tell you the truth behind all this, but it will all become apparent in good time. Meanwhile, I've heard two wildly different versions.

The first is that Flavio Briatore was also caught on the hop. Alonso was flexing his muscles. Fernando, apparently, is not always as easy to handle as the PR machine would have you believe, and here was the new World Champion, his own man, wanting to earn a big salary and wanting to drive the most competitive car. McLaren fitted the bill on both counts and Ron Dennis, ever the opportunist, wasn't backward in coming forward.

Why the rude timing? After all, it was only a couple of short weeks after Renault's Pat Symonds had waxed lyrical about Fernando's qualities at the Autosport Awards. And barely hours before an 800-strong Renault World Championship celebratory bash, for which Blenheim Palace in the UK had been specially hired. The only absentee? You got it, the champion himself! Thanks guys, and Merry Christmas...

A man at Renault, a smile masking any bitterness or cynicism, thought that perhaps it wasn't too surprising. Flav and Ron, he pointed out, have never topped each other's Christmas card list. And maybe McLaren needed some good news.

Okay, Vodafone is a coup for 2007, but perhaps 2006 wasn't looking too hot. Adrian Newey has gone, they've popped a few Merc V8s in testing and there's been no news about a title sponsor this year. So perhaps they're a few bucks down, too. What an excellent antidote to announce the signing of the World Champion. And if it just happened to throw into a spin all Flav's promotional and marketing campaigns based around Renault's new World Champion, then what a jolly wizard wheeze! And didn't Ron have some previous in the manner in which he signed Montoya?

Diametrically opposed to that is the view that the well-connected Briatore always knows exactly what is going on. Only today I heard the theory that Renault head honcho Carlos Ghosn will soon announce an F1 pull-out at the end of the season, dovetailing with Michelin, but that Renault will remain as an engine supplier for anyone who wants to purchase V8s. I'm also told that Briatore has a financial stake in the team's Enstone factory and so it would be possible for the team to continue as an independent without too much of a hiccup. Budgetary indigestion excluded, of course.

Would Flav have the dough to run as an independent? First off, it's not impossible that another manufacturer might spot a recent championship-winning operation and an engine waiting to be badged, and jump at the opportunity. Second, Briatore is hardly on the breadline to start with.

But you can bet that Ron would not have signed Alonso with baggage, and so any remaining portion of a managerial allegiance is likely to have been bought out. And Alonso, of course, is managed, albeit indirectly, by Briatore. I've heard $15 million mentioned...

All good fun. Let's see which little scenario looks closer to the truth come season's end...

But back to the cars. At the time of writing, Pedro de la Rosa has set the quickest time, but that's with a V10-powered McLaren and pretty much irrelevant.

Michael Schumacher has also been going ominously quickly with a new V8-engined Ferrari. But this should be no great surprise. Ferrari admit to dropping the ball in a couple of areas with the F2005 but, says Ross Brawn, it wasn't a bad car.

A significant factor in Ferrari's performance drop-off was the Bridgestone tyres. An excellent product when aiming at outright performance, Bridgestones proved less suitable when, as last year, the Holy Grail was durability. But at tracks on which wear wasn't too big an issue - Imola, Monaco and Montreal to an extent - the Ferrari still looked formidable.

The crucial reversal in the tyre regulations - going back to race tyre changes and thereby shifting the emphasis back to outright performance and right up Bridgestone's alley - was voted through by the F1 Commission and rubber-stamped by the FIA in December. It was a crunch issue.

Some of those Michelin team bosses who publicly said that they would vote for race tyre changes "in the interests of the sport," didn't. The motion was resolved when Michelin-supplied Red Bull voted with the Bridgestone allies. Michelin, I gather, was so hacked off that it investigated legal action for breach of a supplier contract before announcing that it was pulling out altogether come the end of the year.

The characteristics of the tyres being tested this winter are entirely different and much more in line with 2004 tyre technology. Allied to that, Schumacher is driving an adapted F2004, not an F2005. Not only was the F2004 a fine chassis but also it was built to more liberal aerodynamic regulations. Maranello will not debut its 2006 car (which some in Italy suggest will be named F248) until later in the month.

At the end of Wednesday's running, Schumacher was around half a second quicker than Toyota test driver Ricardo Zonta, who knows Jerez better than the mayor.

Toyota, for its second season under the full guidance of technical director Mike Gascoyne (who inherited the TF104 when he joined the team in December 2003), have adopted a policy of debuting the mechanical components of their new TF106 as early as possible and will bring the Bahrain aero package to the car as late as possible - probably for the final two tests in February, before the cars head for the Middle East.

How much is a 2004 Ferrari aero package worth around Jerez? That's the $64 million question. Nobody is quite sure, but Zonta seems pretty secure with Toyota's position.

"If we take away the people with V10s or earlier, more advantageous aerodynamic configurations, we are always in front," the Brazilian said on Wednesday. "Yesterday we were quickest and it was the same again today. That's difficult for people to appreciate just by looking at laptimes, but if you compare our car to others in a comparable specification, we are very quick."

Elsewhere, Giancarlo Fisichella debuted the new V8-powered Renault R26 and a positive sign was a reliable and relatively consistent first run. Performance testing will not be on the agenda yet, and so it was hardly surprising that the laptimes did not set the world on fire. Reliability will have been relief enough for the team. Dyno testing is no substitute for track testing, and the champions are the last team to run their new 2.4-litre.

Of course, the scandal-mongers are wondering whether there's any significance in Fisi driving the R26 first. Given what's happened, perhaps indicative of a change in priorities that will see Giancarlo blow away Fernando in 2006? A load of old scuttlebutt, I'm sure, but stranger things have happened.

The other pukka new car on display in Spain is the Red Bull RB2, complete with its Ferrari V8. David Coulthard has thus far done limited laps and, as in the car's Silverstone shakedown, the team is busy carving slots into the bodywork left, right and centre to assist the cooling.

"Oops, bloody hell!" pronounced one engineering sage. "If it's brewing up at Silverstone in December and at Jerez in 5 degrees, those prancing horses are going to be galloping towards the first camel water trough when we get to Bahrain!" Let's hope, for DC's sake, that he's wrong...

On the tyre front, it looks like we could be in for a sharp U-turn. So far it seems that the Bridgestone first lap performance is very strong, and then comes significant drop-off, while the Michelins appear to be struggling a little for one-lap performance.

It might not be a surprise, therefore, to see the Michelin tactics developing around longer first stints. But it's early days. Stay tuned!

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- The Autosport.com Team

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