Ladies and Gentlemen,

I had to call Bernie to express our dissatisfaction. The fans’ clamour is universal: this F1s sound horrible. And they are ugly, but we can live with that, not so when they sound like lawnmowers. Bernie’s response was basically ‘I told you’, he says was the first to complain.”I'm disappointed that I was right when I said what was going to happen. I'm sorry that it's happened." Jean Todd said the disapproval has been so overwhelming that the FIA is willing to talk to the teams to correct this situation, so there's hope. Another possible upcoming change is to increase the 100kg per hour limit in fuel consumption (the one RIC got penalized for) if that helps improving the show. In the end, as Bernie said to the GP organizers who are most unhappy about the new-generation F1s: “This is the World Championship, these are cars, this is what we’ve got”.

Now let´s get focused in the task at hand: we have a double header the next two weekends, the Malaysian GP starting tomorrow followed by the Bahrain GP 4-6 April.

Concern numero uno for the engineers in Sepang are the 2 longs straights (1km+ each) that will keep the turbos under full load for about 10 seconds each time. That’s 20 seconds for the turbo propeller spinning at 100,000 rpm each lap. Cooling gets even more complicated because forced-engines do not like the high humidity of Malaysia- something that wasn’t a problem with the naturally aspirated ones. The other concern for everyone (except Mercedes) is that the top speed of the Silver Arrows is so much higher than the rest that they were not even using 8th gear in Albert Park (!). Will they be unstoppable in this kind of high speed circuits? Ferrari has many reasons to be worried, it was not only the ‘brake by wire’ system that affected both drivers, it has permeated that their engine is down in power because it uses more fuel and they have to run lower RPMs, it’s said it’s down 30 hp compared to the Mercedes. And the engine itself is 13 kilos heavier that the german unit and has a slightly higher centre of gravity. So far it has been very reliable, but as Pat Fry says: “That’s not enough…” Renault has “found and fixed all the issues they had in Australia”, let’s see how close are they this weekend to the Mercs. Ron Dennis declare that they “will close the gap to the top 0.5 secs” by this race- sounds very optimistic. Williams should be the second best team after what we saw 2 weeks ago, something that will be very popular among the F1 fraternity.

Our CFA winner last year was Rodrigo with 10 points, but we registered several colleagues with only 3-point scores. The best we could do in QF?  2 members with 2 points…

Let’s connect tomorrow with the first results from the track.

Cheers