Formula One 2012

[ctjet]

Clearly 20 races is too many, even with the mid season break. Perhaps this is recognition of that and the squeeze is on for a few more bucks from 2 or 3 tracks who are likely to be replaced.

I'd like to see; Bahrain, Valencia, Hungaroring, Korea, Abu Dhabi and one of the US tracks replaced with something else. Shit even the A1-Ring was good viewing, especially across the top section, and yet here we are stuck watching the dock yard in Valencia.

Cant be too long now until Bernie has to go, just going to have to wait the son of a bitch out I suppose

[ctjet]

soooo... launch dates hey

[JAS-25T]

click link for pics etc.

Bernie's billion dollar babes

Richard Williams

December 20, 2011

Father figure ... Bernie Ecclestone, pictured with his daughters Petra, left, and Tamara. Photo: Getty Images

AS A doting father, Bernie Ecclestone supplied his elder daughter with the money to fund the recent purchase of her £45 million ($A70 million) London house. But the formula one supremo, 81, could not bring himself to sit all the way through a single episode of the free-spending 27-year-old's recent three-part reality show, Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl.

''I watched one of them,'' he says with a despairing sigh. ''I don't know if it was the first or the second. Not all of it.''

He frowns at the memory of what he saw, and explains how Tamara had ignored his advice. ''I told her: 'If you portray yourself really as you are, it's wonderful. But they aren't going to let you. They're going to wind you up, for sure. There'll be things you'd rather they didn't show that they'll show, and all the things you'd rather they showed, they won't. Because that's the sort of show it is.' I said: 'You don't need the money.' But I think she got talked into it. She believed the show was going to be about Tamara in normal life.''

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Sisters ... Petra, right, and Tamara. Photo: Getty Images

Hang on a minute. This is a girl with 200 Hermes handbags and a turntable set into her front drive, to save her the trouble of doing a three-point turn in her Ferrari. Can she be said to have a ''normal life''?

''Yes. But I think they pushed her into not being herself and in the end she got carried away and thought: 'I'm a superstar, I'm rich, and now I've got to show I'm rich and a superstar.' But, you know, she'll be in the kitchen like everyone else.

''Yes, for sure, she goes and buys loads of shoes and bloody clothes. Unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. I suppose it's because … one wonders … and this is not in her defence - how many other girls her age would do the same if they could?''

But what about the notorious bath made to Tamara's specification from crystal brought from the Amazon, which allegedly cost £1 million?

''First, it wasn't like that. It wasn't a crystal bath for a million quid. It's the hype again. Makes me bloody mad. It cost nothing like that. Not true. Not at all.''

Tamara's 22-year-old sister, Petra, had a wedding this summer costing £12 million and lives in an $US85 million pad in Los Angeles, which changed hands for cash (the owners had been asking $US150 million: a typical Bernie deal). Surely it must be hard for the daughters of such a generous billionaire father to retain a sense of proportion?

''I think so. But, as I say, most girls would like to do the things they do, probably.''

And then, with an air of mild exasperation, he raises the subject of ''the trust'' - something called Bambino Holdings, set up in an offshore tax haven in the 1990s, into which Ecclestone put £3 billion of the money he made from his ownership of formula one's commercial rights. The trust is registered in the name of his Croatian ex-wife, Slavica Radic, from whom he was divorced three years ago after 24 years of marriage.

It came into the news last month when he found himself in a German court, explaining why he had given $44 million to a banker called Gerhard Gribkowsky, who is accused of massive fraud. He feared Gribkowsky was about to tell the British tax authorities that it was Ecclestone who controlled Bambino Holdings, which would have made him liable to pay tax on its funds. Now his lack of control over all that money is clearly irritating him.

''I gave to my wife the things that she put in a trust for herself and the kids, and the kids have had access to that money,'' he says. ''The idea was that they'd buy super-quality property, property that would be long-term, for their kids and everything else. Didn't happen. They haven't done that. So they've had access to money which they've spent. And Tamara's program just wound everything up, because that's what they wanted.''

He is satisfied, however, that the program's view of his elder child was a distorted one, and the proof came during those now famous nuptials in the grounds of a rented castle outside Rome, where 250 guests drank Chateau Petrus at £4000 a bottle to the strains of the Royal Philharmonic, Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and Eric Clapton.

''I spent the weekend with both of them at Petra's wedding,'' Ecclestone says, ''and Tamara was an angel. Nothing like that show in any shape or form. She was Tamara.''

At 81, Ecclestone looks much like the Bernie of 30 years ago, when he had just won the battle to wrest control of formula one from the amateurs who had run it for the better part of a century. If being violently mugged outside his home near London's Harrods department store, as he was last year, failed to age him, an event such as the German court hearing - his first experience of such circumstances, he says - seems to put an extra glint in his eye.

Gribkowsky, as he told the German judge, had tried to shake him down. ''He wanted money to start up on his own. He wanted to leave the bank and start a property business - with me. He was shaking me down. I don't blame him. I misled him a little bit, because when he asked me, I said: 'Let's see what we can do.' We're English, we don't say no.

''I asked the trust: 'What's going to happen if this guy tells the [uK] revenue that I'm managing the trust, which is what he was inferring?' They said: 'If he does, the revenue will want to come and check and they'll assess you and you'll be in court for three years proving all the things that are wrong, and it'll cost you a fortune, and the trust as well. You'd be assessed at 40 per cent tax on about £3 billion. I said: 'I can't afford it. What shall I do?'''

What he did, as he told the court, was to pay Gribkowsky £27.5 million to keep schtum: ''I thought it might keep him quiet and peaceful and friendly and stop him doing silly things.''

Gribkowsky denies blackmail.

If Bernie's business affairs seem a little more complicated than the average citizen's, that is probably how he likes it. When author Tom Bower published an Ecclestone biography called No Angel early this year, whole sections were intelligible only to those with an understanding of the financial stratosphere.

And Ecclestone's handling of Bower, whose reputation was built on his evisceration of the likes of Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black and Richard Branson, provides evidence of how this son of a Suffolk trawlerman finesses potential enemies.

Not that he has read the book. ''I don't read books. But most people who read it thought it was a good book. Did you read it?''

Yes. It was entertaining, but lacked the anticipated revelations. Either Bower had got too close to him, or maybe - as unlikely as it seems to experienced Bernie watchers - there really is nothing to reveal about this most mysterious of tycoons, a man both accessible and frustratingly opaque.

''That's what the problem was. I used to say to Tom - because we've become quite good friends - 'What can I do that's evil for you?' He was upfront with me and I gave him complete co-operation. Anyone he wanted to speak to, I called and said: 'Talk to this guy - tell him the truth.' Because he had a reputation coming in. Somebody called me and said: 'There's a guy doing a book on you, but he's not a normal guy for doing books, he's destroyed a few people.' I said it wouldn't be a bad idea if he came and had a chat before he started destroying me, because maybe he could find even more to destroy. So Tom arrived and we had lunch and that's how the name of the book came about. I said: 'You write what you like, provided it's more or less the truth, because I'm no angel.' And when we'd finished the book, he said: 'Would you mind if I called the book No Angel?' I said: 'Bloody good name.'''

Bower had finished his work before the violent suppression of anti-government unrest in Bahrain led first to the postponement and then to the cancellation of a race for which Ecclestone receives a reported $40 million a year from the emirate's ruling Al Khalifa family, several of whom are confirmed petrolheads.

This week it was announced that Bahrain is back on formula one's 2012 calendar, scheduled for April, even though human rights organisations are still protesting about the treatment of medical personnel imprisoned for ministering to wounded protesters.

''The people I've met there are lovely people,'' Ecclestone says, prompting the response that jailing doctors for treating demonstrators doesn't seem very lovely.

''Do you know that? Do you actually know that? If that's right, it's wrong … We have been assured that this is not what's happening. In fact, they had a report made, allegedly independent. What did the report say? Yes, there were instances or whatever, but I wanted to go out there. I was happy to go. I'd like to go into the prison or the hospital or whatever and ask: 'What actually happened?'''

Maybe they would let him, I suggest, if he asked. ''I have asked. They said, 'No problem.' The danger is you go out there and they pick you up in a limousine and take you to the best hotel and take you to dinner and then put you back on the aeroplane.''

All over the world, in China, India, South Korea, Abu Dhabi, Malaysia, Russia and Melbourne, governments are throwing money at Ecclestone in order to burnish their image by holding a round of the formula one championship. He has landed himself in trouble before by remarking on Hitler's ability to get things done, but had he been president of the International Olympic Committee in 1936, would he have sanctioned the Berlin Games?

''It depends what evidence I had on what was happening in the country … the minute you go into somebody's country, you've got to respect exactly what their way of life is: their religion, their laws or whatever.

''It's not correct to go moving into somebody's country and try to change them. Don't go. If you know something's wrong, stay away. We pulled out of South Africa years ago [in 1985] because of apartheid. I witnessed things that had happened there which upset me. I thought: 'That ain't the way to go on.' I hope we go to Bahrain and there's no trouble … That's what I hope.''

But if somebody came to him with incontrovertible evidence that unacceptable things were still happening there, what action would he take?

''We'd have to give it some serious thought, then. But we've been to Argentina when there's been big dramas. There's been dramas in Brazil. Bad things happen there. I think you can look anywhere now and it's not all good. You can't really hold England up as being all good, can you? There have been some terrible atrocities that we committed.''

Bernie Ecclestone apologising for the slave trade and the Black Hole of Calcutta, as well as for his daughter's televised indiscretions? Too much for one day.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/luxury/bernies-billion-dollar-babes-20111217-1ozv6.html#ixzz1h23GbYIz

[mad082]

the one on the left looks like a character from thunderbirds.....

[ctjet]

Fcuk them

I just want the passes from around their neck

[JAS-25T]

Fcuk them and then I'll take the passes from around their neck

FYP

[Owgasm]

Fcuk them

I just want the passes from around their neck

I'd be more than happy to take both.

[ctjet]

but

what are you going to do with both passes?

[sh@un]

make haters hate

[Dani Boi]

I bought a ticket to go and see the F1's in Melbourne, first time seeing them live so should be good. Think from memory it cost $410 for a 4 day pass

Edited December 20, 2011 by Dani Boi

[ctjet]

you got in right before they go turbo

lucky boy

[N1GTR]

The French Grand Prix is close to making a return to Formula One, according to the delegate in charge of bringing the race back.

Gilles Dufeigneux, who in June was appointed by French prime minister Francois Fillon to lead efforts to arrange the race's comeback, met with Bernie Ecclestone at the Belgian Grand Prix earlier this year and insists: "Things are moving in a very real way".

Nice-Matin is reporting that the event will be staged at Paul Ricard, with an annual race date alternating with Belgium's Spa-Francorchamps.

"All the indicators are green now, or soon will be," added Dufeigneux. "My current mood is summarised with three words: optimism, prudence, humility. We have entered the stage of completion and we can say that final decisions will be made very soon, in January or early February."

The last French Grand Prix took place at Magny-Cours in 2008.

ESPNF1

[Owgasm]

but

what are you going to do with both passes?

Give you one. No problems.

you got in right before they go turbo

lucky boy

What will they rev to once turbo is in?

Will they sound the same

[mad082]

and will they dose?

[tweety bird]

it's good the French Grand Prix is coming back.

merc on turbo f1 cars.

Mercedes-Benz is set to run its 2014 turbocharged Formula 1 engine on a dyno test bed imminently, AUTOSPORT has learned, as technical chiefs played down concerns the new power units will not sound great.

With development of the new V6 engines pushing on, Mercedes-Benz sources have confirmed that the company's first version of its 2014 engine will be ready 'soon' - although a final date has not yet been sorted.

And with much interest about how these new engines will sound, amid concerns from Bernie Ecclestone and grand prix promoters that they will not be as loud as the current V8s, the man heading the design has no such worries.

Mercedes-Benz engineering director Andy Cowell said: "The engines are high revving. You don't get the maximum fuel flow rate until you are above 10,500rpm, and the maximum revs are at 15,000rpm. Plus, with six pipes going into one turbocharger, a single tail pipe from six cylinders revving at 15,000rpm I think will sound very nice."

The move to V6 turbos for 2014 has also prompted fears about a fresh spending war between manufacturers, but Mercedes-Benz is also confident now that strict technical regulations have kept costs under control.

This means that the idea of an engine-specific Resource Restriction Agreement has been dropped because it is no longer necessary.

Thomas Fuhr, managing director of Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines, said: "The biggest achievement with this, irrespective of a physical RRA, was to get sensible technical regulations.

"The FIA, together with the manufacturers, did a great job. A lot of things are pre-defined, so you don't spend money developing it - you know there is a single turbo, so it makes things much, much easier. That is the biggest benefit out of these regulations.

"If you control it technically, it is much easier saying you can control it here and there. You see on the chassis front how complicated it has got. The FIA has it in hand with the engines, and there is no way you can go around this topic."

Edited December 21, 2011 by tweety bird

[chef_stagea]

Hulkemburg and di resta have signed to force india for 2012

[tweety bird]

we know....

that quote i put up earlier said the turbo f1 engines are coming in 2014.

[N1GTR]

If they're so worried about noise, go back to V10's FFS

[ctjet]

Nando and his missus are getting a divorce

no good

kimi still with the hottest wife, therefore winning

[Owgasm]

we know....

that quote i put up earlier said the turbo f1 engines are coming in 2014.

All I could think of while reading.

???