"Cato Batista" 19/06/2014 16:45:03 ID #602

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let’s rejoice, we have a GP weekend coming up: after the Montreal thriller we are going to Austria for the 8th round of the Championship.

Seems that RIC’s first win made everybody happy, it was a fresh injection to the two-driver-very-predictable-season we’re enduring. He’s been driving superbly all year even making multi-champ VET looking pretty ordinary. Also we saw that Mercedes are not bullet-proof, that Red Bull-Renault are seriously committed to close the gap to them (not so Ferrari, already thinking of next year) and that the right tyre choices and strategy can make other teams (Williams, Force India) to compete for top placings.

The last time we visited the re-named Red Bull Ring was 2003. It used to be the glorious Osterreichring and the later washed-down A1 revision, with the same layout to these days. Only 4 of the current drivers had previously competed here in F1: BUT, ALO, RAI & MAS. McLaren has won 6 times this GP, Ferrari 5, but probably they will not repeat this time: the last GP winner other than Red Bull or Mercedes was last May 2013, and the last time somebody else was on pole was McLaren in November 2012.

I have a good story to tell you. You may not want to believe me but it is true. We (as in ‘us’ at the CFA) were contacted by none other than Bernie’s own attorney for Copyright infringements of the FIA F1 trademark. Many of you probably don’t know but we have more that 250 tweeter followers besides the many hundred of readers on our CFA website around the world. I guess this lawsuit it’s the downside of becoming famous, It comes with the territory . I should had thought about it when the Official tweet of the Automobile Club of Monaco became followers of Manbos’s fantastic Biorhythm Charts from our web (it is regularly used by some of you with very good results in the pool I must say). But don’t worry, our legal department will deal with this issue. Worst case scenario I’ll discuss this personally with Bernie...while we share jail time.

Let’s be in touch tomorrow after the first day of practice. It’s has been another hard fought CFA season so far and need every point we can get. The first six races of the season went to 6 different winners: Ricardo (7 points), Ricky (13), Cato (9), Fernando (18!), Maria (12), Lou (12) and we still have the outcome of the Canadian GP to be decided this weekend between Manbos and I (10). The trend is very clear: to win a race you have to score 4 correct driver/positions...not easy at all.