Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Been a busy day today on the Sol Real project. Web site has been updated and looks like a version we can go live with as long as the other guys are happy. Video needed a lot of "tweaking" to put it kindly and rewrote the story line and script yesterday afternoon. Spent the morning with the editor and I think we have it back on track. Both of these will be works in progress, as starting any project like this is difficult. There is no track to film or photograph, so we have to try and use stock footage, which for country club tracks is almost non-existent. Hopefully Thursday we will have a revised video to look at.

Moved furniture into the hanger we are going to use as our presentation area, and installing A/C. "Toys" will go in early next week and some suitable posters and photos and we will be ready for a dress rehearsal. We progress.

More e-mails overnight from foreign parts, and at least two could actually turn into projects. Documents coming for a new expert witness commission, and the attorney is actually coming to see me this time. Being involved in these cases is a salutary experience and shows just how dangerous motor sport is and just how you cannot take your eye of the ball for a second when running a track. It is like when I design a track, I have to keep telling myself that anything can happen and probably will at some point in time at each and every point around it.

In the wider world, the Ferrari debacle still reverberates. Bernie has come out and said whatever the teams do should be their business, because to him it is a business, but businesses succeed because of their customers, so ignore their views at your peril. There is a short piece on Last Turn Club about the decline in the attendance at the Brickyard 400, and how this is a sign of a serious loss of interest in NASCAR by its fans, and NASCAR needs to pay attention.

Murphy the Bear has his latest offering on www.murphythebear.com, always worth a read, and interesting forecast on who will have an ALMS race next year. In other news Mini announces it is coming back to world rallying, a place where it made its name in the 60's. Villeneuve and Durango are confident in their bid for the next F1 team slot, and Austin announces the site for the track and a major backer in Red McCombs. Tavo says the USGP was successful when it was run at a permanent circuit, i.e. Watkins Glen, but that was long before Bernie was running things and when the cost of the rights was the prize money.

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?