A one year deal for Coulthard

David Coulthard, German GP 2004© The Cahier Archive

As we predicted 10 days ago, David Coulthard has been signed by Red Bull Racing for the 2005 season. The team has not named a second driver but it is expected that the Austrian-owned team will eventually nominate Austrian driver Christian Klien who did not have a particularly enthralling first year in 2004 but who seems to have been save because he is an Austrian and Red Bull is fearful of dumping the local hero in favour of Vitantonio Liuzzi, an Italian. Liuzzi has performed much better than Klien in recent testing despite his lack of F1 experience but it seems that Red Bull is going to try to put him in as a test driver rather than doing the logical thing and giving the FIA International Formula 3000 Champion his chance in F1. There are no guarantees that Liuzzi would accept the role as test driver for the team and may be trying to get a deal with Jordan, although the news that Arden International is no longer interested in buying Jordan is another blow to Liuzzi's ambitions. Jordan is understood to be looking for money and Liuzzi may decided that if he has to be a test driver, it is best to be with a top team although the Italian is hoping to get a guarantee of a race drive from a team which wants him a tester in 2005. This is entirely reasonable given that Liuzzi has already shown that he can be competitive in F1 in tests with Sauber and Red Bull Racing.

We hear that inside Red Bull Racing they are keen to run Liuzzi in 2005 but may end up with Klien simply because of circumstances. With the rules as they are, Klien cannot be a test driver in 2005 because he did too many races in 2004 and thus he cannot be included in the team as the third driver. This absurd situation has led to all manner of rumours about the team starting the year with Klien and then switching to Liuzzi but none of these ideas are very intelligent or straightforward. The option is to drop Klien and face the wrath of the Austrian press. If nothing else this would prove that Red Bull wants to be taken seriously as a racing team rather than being a rather parochially-minded sponsor. The team is also expected to name American Scott Speed as a test driver although the European Formula Renault Champion is expected to pop up in GP2 this season. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Red Bull has recently signed up Switzerland's Neel Jani as one of its driver line-up in 2005

DECEMBER 17, 2004

Ford and Jackie Stewart

Jackie Stewart, British GP 2004© The Cahier Archive

The Ford Motor Company has confirmed that it is ending its 40-year relationship with the Jackie Stewart. The relationship began in 1964 when Stewart was given his first contract to promote Ford cars and since then he has been closely associated with the company. In the 1970s Stewart won three World Championships with Ford Cosworth engines. In the 1990s he convinced Ford to fund his F1 team Stewart Grand Prix and then managed to sell the team to the Detroit company. The team became Jaguar Racing and Stewart's last role was a consulting deal to help the team with its sponsors. The relationship became somewhat strained in the middle of the season when it became clear that Stewart was planning to work with the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2005

A sign of the times

Former Formula 1 driver Erik Comas and his team mate Toshihiro Kaneishi took their Hasemi Nissan 350Z Turbo to victory in the inaugural All-Japan GT promotional event at the California Speedway. The exotic Japanese GTs drew a crowd of 30,000 which is rather better than the audiences at recent IRL races at the venue. The event was planned to meet the demand for souped-up GTs in California where the coolest cars are now considered to be those fitted with all the latest Japanese GT gadgets. This is in part due to the growth of the new sport of drifting.

Drifting grew out of illegal road racing in the hills around the towns of Rokkosan, Hakone and Irohazaka in the early 1960s. Youngsters took their cars to remote country roads and rather than race them concentrated on trying to get the cars sideways and then controlling the slides from corner to corner. The art is to achieve a series of corners in as flowing a motion as possible without regaining traction. The activity gained a wider audience when a new generation of urban drifter developed and fans of the sport began to turn up at events. Problems with the law led the best of the drifters to organize their own events at race tracks and from there it developed into a professional business where the best drifters went head to head in demonstrations, attracting big crowds and thus marketing opportunities with sponsorships, mainly from companies involved in after-market accessories, who recognised the opportunity to tap into youth culture by way of a spectacular activity which had the addiional cachet of having once been illegal. It was a phenomenon not unlike NASCAR in that respect.

The switch from underground sport to the mainstream was a success in Japan and the Japanese have now organised a D1 championship and are trying to export the sport to the United States of America. Last year a group of D1 drivers put on an exhibition at Irwindale, California, drawing a sell out crowd of more than 10,000 people.

Wired magazine recently likened the new sport to skateboarding and said that "drifting is starting to look like the next pop fusion of customer culture and rebel aesthetics". This is, of course, the perfect vehicle for marketing to the youth of America and this year it seems that drifting will gain an even bigger hold in the USA as no fewer than four videogames about drifting appear in shops across the nation...

Automotive ballet may not seem much of a threat to the testosterone-driven racing boys but it seems that drifting is something which will ultimately have an affect on motor racing, if only because it will deprive young racers of funding

The confused world below F1

The plethora of novice championships surrounding Formula 1 is very confusing - even to the experienced race fan. There was a time when the racing world was neatly structured with Formula 1, Formula 2 and Formula 3. The disappeared in the 1980s when the FIA adopted the illogical concept of Formula 3000 to differentiate the new series from the old F2. Now the FIA has abandoned Formula 3000 and agreed to let a privately-owned (although who knows by whom) championship called GP2 take over the role of being the primary feeder series to Formula 1. This has attracted 12 teams but must now prove its viability by delivering (and maintaining) 24 cars. Most of the teams seem to be dependent on drivers bringing money and there is currently something of a dearth of youngsters wandering around with the kind of money needed for GP2.

DAMS will be running Jose Maria Lopez and Fairuz Fauzy. The new HiTech Piquet Racing will feature Nelson Piquet Jr and probably Xandinho Negrao. The BCN team has signed Venezuela's Ernesto Viso and been testing Nico Rosberg and Rob Austin and will soon test Japan's Hiroki Yoshimoto. Rosberg is expeced to sign for either BCN or Racing Engineering. The latter is expected to field the new Spanish Formula 3 Champion Borja Garcia. Campos Motorsport will probably run Sergio Hernandez and may also run Roldan Rodriguez. The team ASM-Todt team is likely to have Alexandre Premat but there is currently no official word on Arden International, Coloni, Super Nova Racing, David Price Racing, Durango and iSport.

GP2 will be seen at most of the European Grands Prix this year but has a decent rival in the new Formula Superfund which has attracted some of the old Formula 3000 teams such as Ma-Con, Astromega and GP Racing plus teams which will switch from the Euro 3000 series. These will probably include John Village Automotive, Euronova and Draco. There will also be a new team called Bradrive. Some of the old Euro 3000 teams cannot afford to move to Formula Superfund and instead plan to run in a series called the 3000 ProSeries. The series will run with the existing cars and will keep the same regulations until the end of 2007. To complicate matters some of the Formula Superfund teams will be running their old cars in this series. In addition to this there is to be a new Italian Formula 3000 Championship which will take in the teams that continue to run older F3000 machinery.

The merger of the Nissan World Series with the Renault V6 Eurocup has created another choice for rising stars. The new World Series by Renault will feature a mixture of the team Nissan and Renault teams which have not moved up to GP2. These include Nissan champions Pons Racing, Carlin Motorsport, Epsilon Euskadi, Draco, Eurointernational, GD Racing, Interwetten, Cram Competition, KTR, Signature and RC Motorsport.

And, of course, we have the new A1 Grand Prix series which will start in September 2005 and will run through the winter of 2005-2006. Many of these cars will be run by teams mentioned above, A1 providing them with a good chance to improve their cash-flow over the winter and (hopefully) bringing new drivers and new money into the sport from countries which traditionally have not had any involvement in the sport

Eddie Jordan

We have asked Eddie to keep us in mind for an event.

Last month Murray Walker re-visited the UAE when he hosted the first Middle East Autocar Awards night. The organisers, 'The Media Factory' put on a splendid night attended by over 500 invited guests. Murray was on great form after flying in from Australia where he took part in a Rally and then went straight to the Dubai Autodrome to test drive over 20 cars prior to the awards.