Whitmarsh says teams will decide future of FOTA

F1 Fanatic round-up

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In the round-up: Martin Whitmarsh says FOTA teams should be proud of its achievements amid growing concern over its future.

Links

Top F1 links from the past 24 hours:

Whitmarsh: FOTA in teams’ hands (Autosport)

“We are not a PR machine, we are there to make some progress. FOTA should be very proud of what has been achieved so far. It can only achieve what its membership wants it to achieve and I think we have still got work to do to play a strong and contributing part to this sport, but we will see going forward what we do.”

In Memory of IndyCar Series Champion Dan Wheldon

Dan Wheldon memorial website.

Jody Scheckter wants son to quit IndyCar after Dan Wheldon’s death (BBC)

“Hopefully this will knock some sense into him and realise there is more to life. It really isn’t worth it.”

Mercedes: Innovative Linked Rear Suspension (ScarbsF1)

Mercedes appear to have adopted a hydraulic solution for managing rear roll and\or heave stiffness. Nothing is new in F1, this solution closely matches the aims of the 1995 Tyrrell Hydrolink system, which I hope to cover in detail in a future blog post. Indeed this is not even new in current F1, as several other teams already run similar and perhaps even more developed systems. But this is the first evidence I’ve had of teams interconnecting the suspension with hydraulics.”

Charity Karting Event – The Forget Me Not 500 (Badger GP)

“There’s a very special karting event happening later this month at the brilliant Daytona Karting circuit in Milton Keynes – the Forget Me Not 500, raising money for the Forget Me Not Childrens Hospice, organised by Porsche racing driver, Tim Sugden.”

Follow F1 news as it breaks using the F1 Fanatic live Twitter app.

Comment of the day

TommyB89 was rooting for Jaime Alguersuari to win Driver of the Weekend before the poll even went up. Here’s why:

My three favourite drivers could well be the top three in DOTW this week.

For me it was Alguersuari, no question. He qualified well, just missing out on Q3, and his race was superb.

At some points he was running as high as third and ended up ‘best of the rest’ only being beaten by the Red Bulls, Ferraris and McLarens.

From the guy who was “too young to drive” and “only in F1 because of sponsorship” he really is having a great season.
TommyB89

From the forum

Happy birthday!

No F1 Fanatic birthdays today. If you want a birthday shout-out tell us when yours is by emailling me, using Twitter or adding to the list here.

On this day in F1

Given recent developments it’s interesting to note the result of qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix three years ago today. Both Force Indias qualified on the back row, and not for the first time that year.

The team has made progress since then and are now regular visitors to Q3. Will the team’s new co-owners Sahara Group help them to continue that progress?

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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57 comments on “Whitmarsh says teams will decide future of FOTA”

  1. That’s brilliant how Tyrell suspension from years ago can be linked to the current day Tyrell Team – it was Tyrell, then BAR/Honda, Brawn and now Mercedes.

    1. A funny coincidence @calum. Or finding some old drawings in a drawer made Ross think it over agian!

    2. Tyrrell was run from an old building in Ken Tyrrell’s woodyard in Ockham, Surrey. BAR bought the Tyrrell assets to obtain an F1 entry but operated exclusively from a brand new factory in Brackley, Northamptonshire. There was little to no contunity in terms of chassis technology or staff.

      Force India can legitimately trace its ancestry back through Spyker and Midland to Jordan – same team, different ownership. Likewise Red Bull to Jaguar to Stewart. But Mercedes’ relationship to Tyrrell is tenuous at best.

  2. Oh Keith, COTD hardly conveys Sunday Nights feelings.

  3. Does anyone know yet what actually killed Dan Wheldon?
    was it due to impact, fire or something else?

    On a related note, open wheel cars would lood wicked with jet fighter canopies

    1. Wheldon`s car lifted an rolled to the left, centrafugal force carried him right…the rest is physics an history..

    2. There hasn’t been any official word, other than that he had “unsurvivable injuries”. The exact cause probably won’t be known until an autopsy is carried out, but Wheldon didn’t die on impact – he wasn’t declared dead until two or three hours after the accident. He most likely had massive internal injuries and died from blood loss.

      1. I wouldn’t read too much into that. Dying at or en-route to hospital sounds a lot better than died on impact or at the scene – given its a sporting event attended by many people. A bit of controversy went down regarding when one is declared “dead” when the marshall was killed at Albert Park a few years back.

        1. Lets not forget Senna, who was `alledgedly` ventalated till the end of the San Marino GP thus allowing it to legally finish before annoucing his death.

        2. Oh, the flaws in your argument, @Hamish

          1) It is illegal to knowingly manipulate medical records. This includes falsely declarating time of death. It’s designed to stop medical fraud – if time of death could be declared whenever it is convenient for a third party, then that opens up all manner of possibilities for companies to avoid liability suits.

          2) When Wheldon was admitted to the university medical centre, he was taken straight to the Intensive Car Unit. No hospital in their right mind would take someone who died at the scene of an accident or in transit to the ICU. ICU is for priority cases, and if Wheldon was already dead, then he was not a priority case and would only have taken up a bed that could have been used for someone who actually needed it.

          3) If Wheldon died at the circuit or in transit, why was he not officially declared dead until three hours later? When Senna died, there was a conspiracy theory suggesting his body had been kept on life support to allow the race to continue – but the race at Las Vegas had been stopped, andthere were no plans to restart it. Nobody stood to gain anything from delaying the declaration of Wheldon’s death.

          4) If we were using your logic of Wheldon being only declared dead at a time that was convenient for Indycar, then it makes more sense for him to have been declared dead at the scene. Wheldon’s car barrell-rolled into the barriers upside down at well over three hundred kilometres per hour. His body would have sustained – and there is no other word for it – a catastrophic trauma. It would be better for him to have been declared dead on impact, because he would have experienced a tremendous amount of suffering otherwise.

          1. Looks like we will have to agree to disagree sorry.

          2. The FIA and Italian authorities still maintain that Senna was not killed instantly, but rather died in hospital, where he had been rushed by helicopter after an emergency tracheotomy and IV administration were performed on track. There is an ongoing debate as to why Senna was not declared dead at the track. Under Italian law when a person dies at a sporting event, that death must be investigated, causing the sporting event to be cancelled……… And yet Prof Sid Watkins who performed the onsite trachy said he felt his spirit leave this world, that being the atheist he is.

          3. And that would only be an issue if Wheldon had died in a race on Italian soil seventeen years ago, Bob. He didn’t. He died in Las Vegas thirty-six hours ago, so United States law applies. The decisions that the Italian authorities made in the immediate aftermath of Senna’s accident in 1994 have absolutely nothing to do with Wheldon’s death.

          4. I fully agree with PM. Also, I don’t like conspiracy theories much, especially not on a subject like this.

          5. I’m on PM’s side. Furthermore. Senna was “alive” for hours because that’s what Italian law required, for the body to be kept on life support, but it was known soon enough that there was no hope.

          6. 1) It is illegal to knowingly manipulate medical records

            You do know how the real world works, right?

          7. PM…

            Being a doctor, I know how declaration of death works. A person isn’t legally dead until such time as a doctor declares it by doing a series of simple tests. The official time of death very rarely correlates with the time they actually “die”. For example, if I’m asked to “confirm death” of a patient, it gets done after I’m finished more urgent jobs. It can be an hour later by the time I get around to doing it, and that’s not to say they haven’t been dead for several as patients can die at any point during the night.

            In this situation, if he was ventilated with ongoing circulatory support, whether it be CPR or bypass pump, his certification of death would be delayed until such time it was turned off. And it’s not uncommon for people to end up in ICU after polytrauma, even if they are techincally “dead”.

            Basically, in other words, you cannot rule out that his actual death and officially declared time of death were at two, quite significantly different moments.

          8. Thank you @mouse_nightshirt, for clearing this point from actual knowledge and experience as a doctor.

            I gather that death would have been declared (and any systems keeping circulation going shut off) only after all his family present had time to say goodbye to Dan.
            Even if he would have brain dead for some while before that.

      2. but Wheldon didn’t die on impact – he wasn’t declared dead until two or three hours after the accident

        that’s a never ending discussion we could have. The fact they didn’t declare him dead doesn’t really mean anything.

        1. Certainly Wheldon had died quite some time before we heard that declaration.

          But as it was said, that his wife and children and family had been with him in his last moments, he did live when arriving in hospital.

          The Sky Sports team learnt of if at about the moment that driver meeting was called, so it would have been shortly before that that he was officially declared to have died.

          1. I believe he was declared dead at 1:54pm PDT. I don’t know what time the accident happened, but I do know that it was less than one hour beforehand.

          2. @prisoner-monkeys in the link @guelp provides below, it says

            Wheldon was airlifted from the Las Vegas track at 1:19 p.m. local time Sunday and taken to the hospital

            and they took a while to get him out of the car before that.

          3. I doubt it would have made much difference. They obvously had to get the danger posed by bruning fuel nullified before they could move in, get car righted and cut him out before he could be taken anywhere. Blunt-force trauma kills quickly if left untreated, though I doubt safety crews could have gotten him out any sooner. I’ve seen pictures from the circuit of Wheldon being prepared for an airlift, and I don’t think he was conscious. He didn’t appear to be in any pain.

        2. He might have died some hours later, but he died because of the injuries he sustained during the crash. They were fatal but weren’t so fast to kill him instantly.

      1. That’s a nice article. I particularly liked this quote from the widow of Paul Dana:

        Bergeson-Dana added: “A common misperception is that they’re in it for that feeling of danger — that was not the case with Paul, he was in it for the challenge. The challenge was in getting the most out of himself and out of the car. It was not about the danger, it was about the possibilities of what could be accomplished.”

    3. The entire crash structure/ “roll hoop” of the car was completely destroyed, shattered, sheared off. It was not there anymore. The forces necessary to do that to a modern race car are obviously stupendous. Any force strong enough to do that overmatch the protection afforded by the helmet and HANS. If Wheldon survived that impact it was surely not with his faculties intact, and I hope he did not suffer any more afterward.

      When you see that several cars exploded with full-on fuel-fires, you know that the central sctructure was totally compromised. If you run a race and half a dozen cars have their fuel cells explode in a wreck, and see a total faliure of a roll-structure, that is a sufficient sample size to prove that you got it completely wrong in spec and design. There entire thinking is wrong for the races they run and I hope they start over again, from scratch, for the 2012 car, after a full engineering analysis of the cars destroyed on Sunday.

      1. As far as I know (Reading the targets set and looked into the offers made for the new car in detail) these are exactly the issues that are already being adressed with the new car.

        Sadly Indycar already offers ample real accident data from the past few years to be able to know what a new car needs.
        I am sure Dallara will intensively look at information from this incident and doublecheck the chassis developed, but this accident would probalby not have had as tragic an ending with that car.

    4. Can I nominate the OP for “Most tasteless post of the day” instead of COTD?

        1. @keithcollantine “Original Poster”.

      1. This thread should win most tasteless thread of the day.
        It’s incredibly ghoulish and unnecessary to ponder (and worse speculate about) the exact cause of death, especially so soon afterwards.

        The organisers and authorities need to know. We, random morbidly curious spectators, do not.

  4. FOTA – somewhere in the corner of the world, Colin Kolles is giggling

    1. Mind explaining?

      1. Kolles is team principal at HRT. HRT is the only team that is not a member of FOTA, because they feel it only serves the interests of the larger teams rather than all of them.

        1. or rather, HRT could really spare the money spend to use for other things, and its never bad for a small outfit to have a bit of negotiation power like this.

    2. The image of a Romanian dentist named Colin maniacally giggling is a very, very disturbing one.

      1. Don’t forget the local anesthetic in a syringe :P

  5. County coroner says cause of death `blunt truama`

  6. Gawd, watching that Jonathan Legard video on the Jody Scheckter BBC story really does remind me what a total dofus that man is :(

  7. Latest pics of the circuit.. By mod and aragon of ssi. As recent as yesterday http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=708714&page=101

    1. Great pictures Jj2691, thanks for the link – very nice pics. Good work by Aragon and Mod SSCI to publish them;

      The track looks pretty well finished at least in the main, if a bit dusty. Of course, we can’t see details, plumbing etc., but it looks like a lot of work has been done to get it ready since the last time we saw pics.

      1. heh, never mind, they even provided pics of the plumbing it seems, great work indeed :)

  8. Formula 1 would be a barren place without FOTA. There is always an argument for it.

  9. Another confirmation how important a job FOTA is doing right now from Withmarsh. If not for that, no one would really even care about FOTA and issue press statements.

    Today I saw another post in Bernies pet blog (PP) of how the teams will never buy F1 as they hardly have the money and it would bring them only a 140 million revenue on a 700 million investment.
    Conveniently forgetting to mention the big load of money that goes to CVC to repay the loans and interest on that, money that would become available to the new owners.

    Powerbrokering in the background!

  10. Thanks for that, it’s looking really good! Looks pretty dusty too so I hope they clean the track.

  11. Thank you Jj2691 that link is working.

  12. Ya they say they will clean it up using sweeper vans. BTW the company which is behind it Jaypee has quite good record as far as landscaping goes, its one company that prides on its landscaping.

    Also the media here is doing more than I expected especially Hindi News channels.

    I think India will be one new place where demand will climb next year onwards given there’s a fall of grandstand prices by 10 to 20%…

  13. “This is McLaren’s 700th grand prix, and 107 grand prix teams have failed since we have been in motor racing. One of the reasons why I subscribe a little bit of time to FOTA is that we have an obligation to try and minimise [this situation] – we cannot afford to spit teams out at the rate we have over the past few years, or over the history of the sport.”

    Nice sentiment by Whitmarsh…hope more of the big teams start subscribing to this view.

    1. Indeed @geemac it would be really great if the big teams did hold with that view.

      1. Except they don’t – so long as they continue to survive, the larger teams will not care how many smaller teams come and go.

  14. autosport.com:Korea seeks to renegotiate contract – cost at $52 million, income (tickets) $16 million; FOM fee: $35 million.

    Small wonder mr. Park, the race promoter, has “a fresh mandate from the South Jeolla provincial government to try and reduce costs”. Without the fee they would be almost even, enough to be able to get other events going during the year to get a better usage of the track.

    1. So, there goes another.
      I can’t imagine à cheaper deal for Korea.

      And, If it happened I would hate it. Spa is far, far, far more deserving à better deal than this historyless Tilke thing. Although it ain’t à bad track.

      But we all know what Will happen… enter Mexico? Argentinië?

  15. Nice thoughts from Peter Windsor on corner names instead of numbers, you will like this one @Keithcallantine

    1. great job typing Bas – @keithcollantine

  16. This question as probably already been asked somewhere on the forum already – but – as morbid as this question is – has anyone any idea as to the survivability of this crash in an F1 chassis?
    Or was the seriousness of this crash beyond the capabilities of that? On that subject is there any specific comparison between the safety of the Indy car compared to an F1 design. I saw a short but interesting interview with Tony Jardine where he briefly begins to discuss the two, saying they are worlds apart, obviously, I expected and understand this, which brings me back to my original question…..how much safer is an F1 design…..Could a similiar specification of saftey be achieved from a smaller budget? Surely if it is going to be a stock chassis, used by all teams, once implimented and retained the initial cost will be the biggest hurdle.

    Obviously there is a huge amount of other considerations to take into account such as track safety, barrier design which I would be considered as well, but focussing on the cars themselves…what do people think?

    If this has already been discussed, apologies…just point me to the forum

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