"Cato Batista" 17/09/2015 18:26:57 ID #813

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The 13th round of the season is coming up up this weekend in Singapore, the night race mother of all street circuits, and if it ever was a chance of Mercedes being beaten, this could be it.

But let’s get to the most relevant news of the moment, and that’s Renault supremo Carlos Ghosn expressing his displeasure at the continuous criticism from partners Red Bull in the last 18 months. He declared that ...“when we were winning (four Championships in a row 2010-13) the Renault name was never mentioned, it was the team that was winning.? So we started to feel the return on this investment was very weak”. He never pronounced “Red Bull” but we know quite well who he was talking about. "So you are in the game that when you perform very well you are never mentioned, and when there is a problem with the team you are the first guy to be pointed at”.

So that’s it. Renault is negotiating an early termination of their contract with Red Bull and Toro Rosso originally running until the end of 2016. Their focus is to come back as a team or retire altogether. They are in talks with buy Lotus, it all depends now if Bernie grants them “Historic status” meaning a bigger slice of revenue earnings. The question now is what Red Bull/Toro Rosso are going to do? Mercedes made clear they don’t want to supply engines to them -the word ‘fear’ fits quite well in here- so the only option left is Ferrari. It looks like F1 is heading to a new, serious crisis: shortage of engine suppliers.

One of our influential (Italian) CFA colleagues was on the phone this morning with Sergio Marchionne to propose a brilliant solution: give free Ferrari engines to Red Bull and Toro Rosso in exchange for Adrian Newey. Brilliant, no?

Nobody in the pitlane knows or wants to talk about engine outputs, the common sense is that about 800 horsepower -including the 160 hp from the electric engine- is the maximum achieved by the Mercedes. In a rare admission Honda F1 motor division boss Yasuhisa Arai gave the public a bit of light on that issue. He said they (Honda) are about 40-50 hp down on Mercedes, ‘just behind Ferrari’ and about 25 hp in front of Renault. If that’s the case, there’s no doubt Red Bull has nowadays the best chassis in F1, by far.

The smoke over Singapore that’s been the alarming news everyday threatening to cancel the race this weekend is not so bad after all. The GP programme is at present due to go ahead as planned although organisers have warned the smoggy conditions are capable of altering hour by hour. Let’s see.

So get you racing hat ready, we will be pressed into action starting tomorrow.

Cheers

Cato