Bob Barnard Track Engineering

So The City of Long Beach is looking for someone the take over the race on their streets. And who do we think is sending them letters of interest. None other than Bernie and his mate Chris Pook, the man who dropped F1 nearly thirty years ago in favor of CART. Why? Simple, even back then he could not make money on F1 when the fee was around $2m a year. Now it is at least ten times that F1 wants to come back. Yes FOM will be running the event, but you can bet Bernie will get his payday from somewhere. The track as it is now is never going to meet F1 standard, so who is paying for the upgrade? No sitting out in the sun like Indycar, these guys are going to want a pit building. Or is this just a Bernie ploy to stick it to existing promoters? 

And then there is Sochi. With Russia invading Ukraine are we seriously going to race in Sochi? I guess some will argue that it is no worse than going to Bahrain, but we should not be going there either. There is not a word being said about Sochi and F1 in any press I have seen, but someone at the FIA and FOM has to be thinking hard about this. Of course, with so much Russian money in F1 now perhaps no one cares to rock the boat. I wonder what it is like to be a Chelsea supporter at the moment. If the UK freezes Russian assets as the US is threatening to do what happens then?

On a better note, testing is over and Australia beckons. Mercedes powered cars seem to have the edge, but it is testing. Well it was for some. The Renault powered cars seem to be in crisis management mode. Still, even Mercedes have their concerns on reliability, so can we see a repeat of Adelaide 85 when four cars finished?