Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Furniture arrived this morning so a day or two unpacking. Won't unpack it all as we will be moving again when the actual track construction starts, need to be closer as the days will be long. These first months are for planning and selling, so need to be here in Mesa. Did this in Georgia, and it is hard as we always need something we did not unpack, so we have to start guessing which box it is in.

Still working with the webmaster to finalize the site. It is my 90/10 rule again, it takes 10%of the effort to get it to 90% finished, and 90% of the effort to finish the last 10%. Always tempting to go public with something close to finished, but that would be a mistake.

Well done Valentino with fifth fastest in qualifying for the German MotoGP. His team "mate" Lorenzo is on pole, and pole is looking very familiar in every class. Vale is aiming for fourth in the race, and who would bet against him?

Le Mans Series in Portugal at the Algarve circuit. Big guys missing so Oreca is on pole in the private Peugeot, but not by much from the petrol brigade. Good field, but it does not seem a real LMS event without the big teams.

Interesting that Jacques Villeneuve has submitted a bid to be the next team to join F1. He has kept that pretty quiet. Not saying if he plans to drive or just manage. If you recall he has done this once before with his manager Craig Pollock when they set up British American racing that morphed into Honda and then Brawn. So do  not write him off, he is apparently collaborating with Durango, a GP2 team, in the bid. The decision is supposed to be the end of this month. I am amazed that none of my readers has any scoop on who Cypher is.

Holiday Monday and not much happening, despite a weekend of racing. Had a great evening at my partner's last night for July 4th. Really nice temperatures and no humidity, lovely.

Happy Birthday Tony Dowe, may you have many more. New blog by "Murphy The Bear" always funny, and some suspect Tony of at least feeding the rumor mill.

The good news for Mark Webber is that he is getting a new chassis after his accident at Valencia, the bad news it is Vettels old chassis. OK, they say they have fixed it, but what message does that send to a driver?

Is F1 well on the way to being a spec series? We have strict rules on engine specs and they are trying to equalise horespower, common ECU, spec tire, and now they are saying they should mandate the weight distribution. Why? To stop teams getting it wrong when they design next years car without knowing exactly what Pirelli is going to provide. Isn't that what this is all about? We will soon have a spec chassis, but wait, wasn't that what Max Mosely wanted? Let's just go with GP2 cars and save probably $200m a team. But who would want to watch?

Talking of spec series and who would want to watch, someone wants to resurrect the A1GP series that lost about $200m the first year and struggled on for a couple more. Why would you want to revive this? They propose to run it like GP2 this time around. Don't we have a series called that? Who else thinks we have too many series already?