Hwa racelab formula e team principal

Ricciardo is weighing up whether to stay with Red Bull, which has backed him through his F1 career, at the same time his team is picking between ditching long-time engine supplier Renault for Honda. The Australian claimed his seventh GP victory last weekend in Monaco, while teammate Max Verstappen – who signed a lucrative new Red Bull deal late last year – started last after a practice crash. "You could say that [winning] made Daniel more expensive, it has put his value up, or it's put the team in a stronger position in terms of valuable potential to him," said Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. "The reality is finding a solution to conclude a deal with Daniel in the next couple of months. "First thing is get the engine sorted and then very much follow on from there with [the] driver." Horner acknowledged that Ricciardo is "continually raising his game" as the Australian reiterated his value as one of F1's leading drivers by matching Lewis Hamilton and … [Read more...] about Red Bull wants to sort engine deal before Ricciardo contract

McLaren finished 2018 – its first season with Renault engines – only sixth in the F1 constructors’ championship, and with barely more than half the number of points of the works Renault team. Yet in 2019, new signings Carlos Sainz and rookie Lando Norris have regularly qualified and raced in the top 10, McLaren lies fourth in the constructors’ table, it already has 20 more points than last year despite being just 12 races into a 21-race championship, and it has accrued more than double the number of points of the Renault team. Brown said that without such a turnaround, he probably wouldn’t have considered approaching the McLaren board members or commercial partners about joining forces with the Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports team and returning to IndyCar racing full-time in 2020. “We’ve definitely made progress but we’ve a long way to go,” he said. “Number 1 on the checklist when deciding when or if we go IndyCar racing is that it cannot be a distraction from … [Read more...] about McLaren’s F1 progress crucial to IndyCar expansion

Normally when the leader of a Grand Prix has a problem on the power unit that costs him 160hp, over two seconds a lap of pure performance, the pursuing drivers will find a way past. Had Daniel Ricciardo’s problem occurred anywhere other than Monaco, they would have done. And had it occurred before the only round of pit stops in the race, then he might have been vulnerable to a strategy move, like an undercut, from Sebastian Vettel or Lewis Hamilton. But Ricciardo had made his only stop of the afternoon before his MGU-K failed. Although he had to play with the controls of the car, shifting the brake bias forward, for example, to help the rear brake temperatures, his car’s gentler treatment of the softest tyres in the Pirelli range was superior to Ferrari and Mercedes. And that proved to be enough to keep him in position on this most difficult of tracks on which to overtake. Because it’s Monaco; track position is everything, as Lewis Hamilton learned to his cost in 2015 … [Read more...] about Strategy Report: Why Ricciardo’s pursuers played it ‘ultra’ safe

Paffett was a part of Mercedes’ line-up for the majority of its factory participation in the revived DTM, completing 15 successive seasons in the series between 2003 and ‘18. During that period, the British driver scored 23 wins, 48 podiums and 17 pole positions, bowing out as a two-time champion when Mercedes exited the DTM at the end of 2018. Following the Stuttgart-based marque’s exit from the DTM, Paffett continued to represent the brand in Formula E and Intercontinental GT Challenge the following year, racing for the affiliated HWA team in the former. But both of Paffett’s programmes lasted a single campaign and he sat out the entire 2020 season, with his outing in Kyalami 9 Hours in November of 2019 remaining his last competitive outing. Speaking during the two-day pre-season test at Hockenheim, the 40-year-old said he didn’t plan on rejoining the DTM this year amid the uncertainty around what regulations the series would adopt following the demise of the Class … [Read more...] about Paffett reveals story behind unlikely DTM return