Word: stillness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from pulling out of the sport anyway (Honda had quit at the end of 2008.) That leaves only three major carmakers - Ferrari (owned by Fiat), Mercedes-Benz and Renault (though the latter recently sold a majority stake in the racing team to Luxembourg investment firm Genii Capital) - still in F1. "The sport just wasn't delivering the value," says John Howett, head of Toyota Motor Sports. For the new season, some of the old names have been replaced by entrepreneurs with more dash than cash. Ecclestone calls the new teams "out of their depth" before the season has even started...
...most flamboyant team managers, Renault's Flavio Briatore, was barred from the sport for life after the FIA determined that he had ordered one of his drivers to crash in a 2008 race to help out Renault's other driver - Alonso, in this case. Briatore is still fighting the ban. (In January, a French court overturned it; the FIA is appealing that decision.) "At times it felt like the whole thing was imploding," says former F1 driver Mark Blundell, now owner of 2MB Sports Management. "I saw a lot of things I didn't like, and it hurt." (Read...
Toward the end of last season, Mosley and the teams finally compromised on something called a Resource Restriction Agreement that takes effect this season. It isn't a cap, but it clamps down on runaway costs like wind tunnels and in-season testing. The big teams can still outspend their smaller rivals on, say, computer simulations, but just about everything in F1 is downsizing. It's now possible to field a respectable team, if not a winning one, for $100 million a season. New FIA president, former Ferrari manager Jean Todt, has pledged to bring costs down further...
...sense as the sport moves away from Europe; those are the markets that American companies want to reach," says Peter Windsor, who is trying to get the new USF1 team off the ground. It also helps explain why YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley is pouring money into F1. Still, much of the sport's mystique rests on its guts-and-glory past. "It's a little frustrating to go to all these places with no sense of F1's history," says Martin Brundle...
...high rollers far away from the cars and the drivers. "F1 has gotten extremely constipated and overly grand for itself," says Jackie Stewart. "When I was a wee boy, I went to the track and got [Juan Manuel] Fangio's autograph, I got Stirling Moss's autograph. It's still a fantastic sport, but it needs more of a feel-good factor...