Essential Reading for November 17th, 2008

Recommended links for November 17th, 2008:

• Klien: ‘09 BMW worst looking car ever - Christian Klien says the BMW Sauber he tested yesterday at Barcelona is the ugliest Formula One car he has ever seen.

  "To me, for the moment, it's the worst (looking) Formula One car I have ever seen. It just doesn't fit together.

• De la Rosa to race Force India? - Pedro de la Rosa has already signed a contract to race with the newly Mercedes-powered and McLaren-equipped Force India team in 2009, the Spanish press declared on Tuesday.

  The Spanish newspaper Diario AS said de la Rosa's signing will be confirmed within a few weeks, insisting the 37-year-old is almost certainly taking the seat of the Roman veteran Giancarlo Fisichella.

• Brundle confirms BBC job - Martin Brundle told the audience at the Autocar Awards in London this evening that he will be commentating with the BBC next year.

  "I'm delighted to be able to tell you all that I'll be joining the BBC next year," he said. "I've been commentating on F1 for the past dozen years and I briefly considered calling it a day, but in the end I decided to take up the BBC's offer and I am now very excited about working for them next year."

• Auto Racing Barrichello, Kanaan win 800-kilometre Granja Viana kart race - Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello and Indy Racing League's Tony Kanaan led their team to victory Sunday in the Granja Viana 500 kart race in Brazil.

  The winning Barrichello Racing team, which also included former F1 driver Luciano Burti, needed nearly 11 hours to complete the 800-kilometre event at the Granja Viana track in South America's biggest city.

• F1 KERS: Bosch goes modular - Bosch has made something of a surprise entry into the increasingly competitive kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) market.

  Its modular KERS package offers customers a menu of parts and options depending on the teams budget and the type of competition it is being utilised in. “We are really prod of being able to show the first scalable KERS on the market” explained a Bosch spokeswoman.

  Bosch has yet to run the system on a car, but it has already performed well on the test bench and is already being offered to partners, time will tell on how many will take it up but knowing Bosch, it will be rather a lot.

• Magneti Marelli reveal F1 KERS - Regenerative braking systems for 2009 are rapidly appearing, Magneti Marelli has revealed it is to join Flybrid, Williams, Zytek and Bosch in offering an off the shelf solution for Formula 1. Its KERS is capable of a maximum energy storage of 400Kj per lap with a maximum 60Kw power boost as per the regulations.

  It was developed with a team (many suspect Ferrari) and is fully integrated with that operations powertain and is not an optional extra like some other systems.

• Honda burns record £147m in F1 - The Honda Formula One team has recorded the highest costs of any organisation in the sport, according to its latest accounts. Last year the team finished only eighth in the world championship but burned through £147m, with almost all the funding provided by the Japanese car company that owns the team.

  The accounts state that Honda will continue to fund the team throughout the 2009 F1 season. Its next set of results are likely to show even higher costs. This year Ross Brawn, the former Ferrari technical director, joined Honda as its new team boss and it is investing heavily in the energy recovery technology that will be introduced to F1 next year.

  Nick Fry, the Honda team’s chief executive, said recently that “the budgets for the top teams are in excess of $300m. While that is sustainable for a team like Honda, we recognise that others cannot compete at that level.”

• The racing is over for the season but F1’s off-track action is hotting … - In 2006 CVC acquired a 69.6pc stake in F1’s commercial rights holder. This was a leveraged buyout funded with debt from RBS which is secured on F1’s key assets. The current financial structure enables CVC to comfortably make its interest payments and pay off the loan principal as required. However, an increase in the share paid to the teams would dent cash flow and could cause a default on debt covenants.

  This would put F1’s commercial rights in the hands of RBS, and ultimately the public, which would be ironic given that the Government refuses to invest in even the British Grand Prix.

• Barcelona test heralds start of 2009 season - Preparations for next season take centre stage from Monday, as the majority of Formula One teams kick off their winter test programmes with a three-day session at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya in Spain.

  Although it’s too early for the debut of any 2009 cars, engineers and drivers will be busy tackling the key rule changes for next season in interim machines. Among the more noticeable changes, we can expect slick tyres and revised aero packages - wider, lower wings at the front and taller, narrower ones at the rear. Less obvious will be development work on the Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) which become legal for ’09.

• Busch loses Toyota test - Kyle Busch's plans to test a Toyota Formula 1 car have been cancelled because the NASCAR star now needs to fly back from Japan to attend an awards banquet in Florida.

  Busch was due to drive the F1 car at the Toyota Motorsports Festival at Fuji Speedway on November 23 but has to be at the NASCAR Nationwide Series prizegiving gala at the Portofino Bay Hotel, at the Universal resort in Orlando as he finished sixth in the championship.

  The top 10 driver in the series are obliged to attend. Busch is reportedly not very happy about NASCAR's insistence that he be there but he says that he hopes he will be able to get a run in an F1 car at some point, possibly in testing in Europe next year.