Bob Barnard Track Engineering

If my French is correct, very doubtful, Concorde means agreement, peace and all that. Bernie announced yesterday to the world that he has Concorde with "most" of the F1 Teams for beyond 2012, i.e. after the current peace agreement runs out. Of course it is not a peace agreement, it is a way to divide up the spoils of the rape and pillage of promoters. Bernie names Ferrari and Red Bull as expected, and McLaren, which was not. Joe Saward suggests McLaren are just trying to outlast Bernie, which some of us may not get to see on Bernie's current form.

So, now Bernie has most of what he needs to float all or part of F1. Again Joe Saward suggests that the lack of a clear successor to Bernie would put off investors, but I think greed wins every time over common sense.

Meanwhile, out on track in the real world, McLaren are beating Red Bull and Ferrari, and everyone else as they did in Melbourne. An interesting few sessions with different teams being fast at different times, so hard to tell who was doing what. In the end McLaren are fastest, but looked very nervous at the back end under braking with Lewis losing it in Q1. Mercedes look fast, with the car suiting Michael a bit more than Nico it seems. Lotus have speed and it will be interesting to see what Kimi can do from his five grid place penalty, could be fun. You can't help thinking Jenson will have the measure of Lewis over a race distance, but let's see, if Lewis can win the start he might just drive away. There again Michael might just drive the pair of them into the pit wall. 

There have to be some disappointed teams. Caterham looked like they made the jump to the mid-field, but now we are racing they are stuck back with Marussia and HRT, with Petrov giving Kovalainen a hard time, and Force India seems to have lost some of the "force." Williams with Maldanado continue to surprise, but Senna is doing an imitation of his Brazillian mate Massa. Ferrari are probably the most disappointed. Massa managed to get his new for Malaysia chassis within 0.3 seconds of Alonso at the end, but for most of the time he was up to a second off the pace. He cannot be long for this seat. 

Sauber are a bit of a mystery. At one point they are among the fastest, and then off the pace. Low fuel runs?

Let us hope for a dry race as I think it will be a good one. Vettel said that using the hard tire to set fast time was not a strategy for the race, and he may be right, there is not much between the compounds and some cars were quicker on the supposedly slower tire, but as he can presumably run longer than those around him on the grid he just may have made the winning move.

Elsewhere Stoner continues to be fastest in MotoGP testing, but we also have a CRT machine getting in amongst the prototypes, so maybe they will not be a complete waste of time.

Indycar kicks off in St Pete if anybody cares.