In the round-up: Max Verstappen welcomed Red Bull’s decision to give his current team mate a new, two-year contract.
In brief
Verstappen pleased Perez re-signed
Verstappen, has won the world championship every year since Sergio Perez joined Red Bull in 2021. He said it is “great news that Checo has signed with the team until 2026.”
“I am glad to be able to continue with the successful partnership that we have created over the past few years,” said Verstappen. “We achieved a record-breaking season last year and the team is very strong, so we are looking forward to building on this success into the next two years as well.”
‘You can’t buy an F1 team for less than $1 billion’
Liberty CEO Greg Maffei, who according to Mario Andretti recently said his son’s team would never be allowed into the series, gave an interview to the official F1 website, which did not ask him about Andretti’s comments or the US team’s bid to enter F1.
However Maffei did indicate what he believes will be the cost to Andretti of entering F1 by buying an existing team instead of creating a new one, which Formula One Management opposes.
“You can’t buy a team for less than probably $1 billion,” said Maffei. He said the changes Liberty Media made to the series it took over in 2017 included “making the teams franchises so that people would really want to invest and there was an opportunity there to make money as a team.”
FIA president Mohamed Ben Sulayem recently changed his stance on Andretti’s application to enter F1, saying they should buy a team, a position echoed by the existing competitors as well as FOM.
Crawford tests for Aston Martin
Aston Martin junior driver Jak Crawford tested one of the team’s cars at the Red Bull Ring in Austria yesterday, one day after Ryo Hirakawa’s outing at the same track for McLaren.
The 19-year-old, who is 11th in the Formula 2 standings, drove the team’s 2022-specification AMR22 at the home of the Austrian Grand Prix.
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Links
Motor racing links of interest:
AJ Foyt’s thoughts on Parnelli Jones (Foyt)
‘He was a clean race driver but a hard race driver. You had to work to beat him.’
Bortoleto: ‘Special’ connection with Invicta gives confidence for the rest of the season (Formula 2)
‘It’s just a shame that we lost two rounds at the beginning of the season with problems that were out of my control, and that took our chances of probably scoring many more points away, but that’s racing.’
Beauty mogul Charlotte Tilbury wants to give F1 a makeover (Financial Times)
‘Tilbury says she felt an immediate affinity with the chronically underestimated women of motorsport. ‘People sometimes say to me, ‘Do you run the business?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, I run the business,’’ she says. ‘I did all the rounds of fundraising. I built it. I look at the (profit and loss) every single day. Everything is in the numbers. I don’t know how you market or create without understanding the commercial side of things.”
A decade of EV development with Formula E at the cutting edge (Formula E)
‘In 2014, when the lights went out on Formula E’s first race start in Beijing, there were fewer than 30 EV models available for purchase accounting for far less than 1% of the total market share of new cars sold at the time. Now, there are more than 600 models in dealerships worldwide.’
Generation Restoration: Doing our bit for World Environment Day (Motorsport UK)
‘Many top-tier championships are already adopting the use of sustainable fuels into their activity from the World Rally Championship to the F4 British Championship certified by FIA to Formula 1.’
‘The $3m figure is double or more what is usually spent by teams on an Indy 500 entry. According to IndyCar executives, a typical Indy 500 entry costs between $1m to $1.5m.’
Factory Focus: Grosjean (Lamborghini)
‘I also fly a lot which makes my life a lot easier getting to and from races quickly, so that I am able to spend as much time at home with the family. I bought my plane in the summer of 2022 and I have got almost 400 hours of flight time now, so I keep on building my experience.’
Monaco Vlog (Carlos Sainz Jnr via YouTube)
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Happy birthday!
Happy birthday to Paradoxos, Jenny O’G and Saurabh!