Valtteri Bottas admits Mercedes’ outright speed over a single qualifying lap will remain unknown until next week when the Silver Arrows hit the track in Melbourne. The German purposefully avoided running on Pirelli’s hypersoft compound in pre-season testing, believing its race-pace work on the medium and soft tyres was the most relevant approach to preparing […]
Robert Kubica concluded his first day of running at Yas Marina with Williams’ FW40 with 100 laps and a fairly irrelevant eighth fastest time. The Pole focused on short performance runs while sampling a range of Pirelli tyres before undertaking longer stints, recording a best lap of 1m41.296. The time, which was about 3.5s off […]
Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke this principle, as has been […]
Toro Rosso boss Franz Tost says Dany Kvyat pretty much has himself to blame for his botched F1 season in which he lost his drive with the Faenza-based squad. Red Bull fired a warning shot at the Russian in 2016 when it demoted Kvyat from the senior squad to Toro Rosso. But impatience coupled with […]
With a desperate lurch to appease the far-right of the Israeli electorate in the final days before national elections in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to declare a re-election victory for his Likud Party early Wednesday morning despite a nail-biting campaign and a recent surge by the more moderate Zionist Union party led […]
Rookie Sergey Sirotkin is just days away from his Formula 1 baptism of fire, the Williams driver following in the footsteps of his trail-blazing countrymen Vitaly Petrov and Daniil Kvyat. Sirotkin’s road to F1 has been well chronicled, the 22-year-old impressing the Grove-based outfit in a post-season test at the end of 2017 in which […]
If war were only “itself” — the violence and horror, the conflagration and death — it would be bad enough, but it’s also an abstraction, a specific language of self-justifying righteousness that allows proponents to contemplate unleashing it not merely in physical but in moral safety. War, the abstraction, is an instrument of policy, an […]
George Russell says his Formula 2 commitments next season will take precedence over any potential FP1 outings with Force India. The 2018 GP3 champion drove in two free practice Friday sessions this year with the Silverstone-based outfit and is the team’s most likely candidate to secure its reserve seat. The 19-year-old Mercedes protégé showed promise […]
F1 legend Niki Lauda has vehemently criticised Liberty Media’s decision to eliminate the presence of grid girls in Formula 1. Speaking to Austria’s Der Standard, the Mercedes non-executive chairman has qualified the move as “completely incomprehensible”. “How dumb can someone be? Women have emancipated themselves and do very well at it,” argues Lauda. “So this […]
Valtteri Bottas says that his Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton triumphed in 2017 as a result of his longer experience at Brackley. Bottas had a strong start to his season, but fell out of contention during a late-season slump. He rallied with a two consecutive second places in Mexico and Brazil, and a win in […]