Ettore Chimeri Louis Chiron Joie Chitwood Bob Christie Johnny Claes
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Formula1Fancast/~3/eRCPvrDugK8/webber-i-wont-be-second-best
Pablo Birger Art Bisch Harry Blanchard Michael Bleekemolen Alex Blignaut
Almost Fernando Alonso's first act after what must have been the huge blow of seeing Sebastian Vettel slash his world championship lead to just four points at the Japanese Grand Prix, was to quote that country's great swordfighter and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi.
"If the enemy thinks of the mountains," Alonso wrote on his Twitter account, "attack by sea; and if he thinks of the sea, attack by the mountains."
That the Ferrari driver can reach for the words of a 17th century kensei warrior and strategist in a moment of such strain reveals a lot about the manner in which he combines an indomitable fighting spirit with a status as possibly the most cerebral Formula 1 driver of his generation.
But it will take more than relentlessness and clever strategy for Alonso to hold on to a lead for which he has struggled so hard this season, but which has now dwindled to almost nothing.
The 31-year-old, who spun out at Suzuka with a puncture after being tagged by Kimi Raikkonen's Lotus on the run to the first corner, has carried his Ferrari team on his back this year.
Alonso has won three races and taken a series of strong points finishes to establish what was until recently an imposing championship lead in a car that has never once been quick enough to set pole position in the dry.
He did so by driving, in terms of consistency and lack of mistakes, one of the most perfect seasons there has ever been - a feat made all the more impressive because it was done in not the best car.

Fernando Alonso leads Sebastian Vettel in the Championship by four points. Photo: Getty
Yet now, through no fault of his own, Alonso has failed to finish two of the last four races and in that time Vettel has made hay, taking 37 points out of his rival's lead.
Heading into Japan, it was already beginning to look as if Vettel was going to be hard to resist.
While the Red Bull has been a forbiddingly quick race car all season, the team did not in the first half of the season find it very easy to get the best out of it in qualifying.
But since mid-summer they have found consistency, and started to qualify regularly at the front of the grid as well. At the same time, luck has deserted Ferrari and Alonso.
More than that, Red Bull also appear in recent races to have made a significant step forward in the performance of their car.
Vettel looked very strong in Singapore two weeks ago, trading fastest times with Lewis Hamilton throughout the weekend and taking victory after the Englishman's McLaren retired from the lead with a gearbox failure. And in Japan the Red Bull looked unbeatable from as early as Saturday final practice session.
How much of this is to do with the new 'double DRS' system which came to light in Suzuka is unclear.
Team boss Christian Horner said he thought it was more to do with the characteristics of the track suiting those of the Red Bull car. Perhaps, but the 'double DRS' certainly won't be doing any harm.
Unlike the system that Mercedes have been using since the start of the season, which uses the DRS overtaking aid to 'stall' the front wing, Red Bull's works entirely on the rear wing.
What it means is that they can run the car with more downforce in qualifying without the consequent straight-line speed penalty caused by the extra drag, because the 'double DRS' bleeds off the drag.
This does bring a straight-line speed penalty in the race, when DRS use is no longer free. But as long as the car qualifies at the front, this does not matter, as it is quick enough over a lap to stay out of reach of its rivals.
It is not clear how long Red Bull have been working on this system at grand prix weekends, but to the best of BBC Sport's knowledge, Japan was the first time they had raced it. Coupled with a new front wing design introduced in Singapore, it has turned an already strong package into an intimidating one.
Vettel used it to dominate the race in the fashion he did so many in 2011 on his way to his second-consecutive title. As he so often does in the fastest car when he starts at the front of the grid, he looked invincible.
Alonso, though, is not one to be intimidated easily and will take solace from the fact that Ferrari's pace compared to Red Bull was not as bad as it might appear at first glance.
Alonso may have qualified only seventh, but he reckoned he was on course for fourth place on the grid before having to slow for caution flags marking Raikkonen's spun Lotus at Spoon Curve.
And judging by the pace shown by his team-mate Felipe Massa in the race, Alonso would have finished in a sure-fire second place had he got beyond the first corner. He might even have been able to challenge Vettel, given how much faster the Ferrari has been in races than in qualifying this year.
Alonso's problem for the remainder of the season is that salvaging podiums is no longer enough - he needs to start winning races again. Which means Ferrari need to start improving their car relative to the opposition.
Meanwhile, spice has been added to an already intriguing final five races by a seemingly innocuous incident in qualifying in Japan.
After slowing as he passed Raikkonen's car, Alonso continued on his flying lap, but when he got to the chicane, he came across Vettel, who blocked him.
Ferrari reckoned this cost Alonso somewhere in the region of 0.1-0.2secs, which would have moved him up a place on the grid. The stewards, though, decided to give Vettel only a reprimand.
They justified this on the basis that they believed Vettel had not known Alonso was there - and they let him off not looking in his mirrors because they felt he had reason to believe no-one would be continuing on a flying lap following the Raikkonen incident.
But some would see that as flawed thinking. Alonso was one of several drivers who had at that point not set a time in the top 10 shoot-out, and all of them were likely to be continuing their laps because whatever time they did set was going to define their grid slot.
Although there is no suggestion Vettel held up Alonso deliberately, the Red Bull driver is a sharp cookie, and almost certainly would have known this.
Even if he did not, his team should have warned him. And on that basis, it can be argued that Vettel's offence was no less bad than that of Toro Rosso's Jean-Eric Vergne, who was given a three-place grid penalty for delaying Williams's Bruno Senna in similar fashion earlier in qualifying.
Ferrari were distinctly unimpressed by the stewards' verdict, but Alonso being Alonso, he has not mentioned any of this publicly. Alonso being Alonso, though, he will have lodged it away for the future.
In the meantime, before heading to Korea for another potentially pivotal race next weekend, might he be studying Musashi a little more?
You must "know the times", Musashi wrote. "Knowing the times means if your ability is high, seeing right into things. If you are thoroughly conversant with strategy, you will recognise the enemy's intentions and thus have many opportunities to win.
"If you attain and adhere to the wisdom of my strategy, you need never doubt that you will win."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/10/post_4.html
Rikky von Opel Karl Oppitzhauser Fritz d Orey Arthur Owen Carlos Pace
At Spa-Francorchamps
In this remarkable season of unpredictability and uncertainty, of seven winners in 11 races, of the most open title battle in years, Formula 1 is still waiting for one big result.
A victory for the revived Lotus team has looked inevitable since the start of the year. And as the world championship re-starts in Belgium this weekend following a month-long summer break, the expectation is that this could be their race.
The car, from the team formerly known as Renault that won two world championships with Fernando Alonso in 2005-6, has been fast all season. Its best result has been four second places. But the momentum seems to be with them.
Kimi Raikkonen's Lotus pushed Lewis Hamilton's winning McLaren all the way in Hungary five weeks ago. The Finn has a stunning record at the stunning Spa-Francorchamps track that hosts this race and Lotus have been working on a technical trick that could give them a key advantage on the demanding track that swoops and twists around the contours of the Ardennes mountains.

Kimi Raikkonen has won the Belgian Grand Prix four times. Photo: Getty
The 32-year-old Finn seems to have a special affinity with the circuit regarded as arguably the biggest test for a racing driver anywhere in the world. He has taken four victories here - and either won or retired from every single race he has competed at Spa since 2004.
Raikkonen's all-action style, based on fast corner entry in a car with good front-end bite, seems perfectly suited to Spa's cascade of long, fast corners.
Two of his wins - for McLaren in 2004 and Ferrari in 2009 - came in years when his machinery was otherwise uncompetitive. The other two were dominant victories from the front in 2005 and 2007.
But Raikkonen's position as arguably the favourite for victory this weekend is not founded just on his renowned Spa specialism. He is widely expected to have the car to do the job.
Lotus have come agonisingly close to victory twice already this year - in Bahrain in April and at the last race, in Hungary at the end of July.
Both times it was Raikkonen who challenged only to just fall short, behind Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel in Bahrain and Hamilton in Hungary. But the Finn, who returned to F1 this season after two unproductive years in world rallying, has actually been Lotus's weaker driver for most of the year.
His team-mate, the Franco-Swiss Romain Grosjean, who is in his first full season, has generally had a marginal advantage - to the point that around the European Grand Prix in Valencia at the end of June there were murmurings of dissatisfaction with the Finn, who won the world championship for Ferrari in 2007.
Raikkonen ultimately finished second to Alonso in Valencia, but had been off the pace of Grosjean all weekend - indeed the younger man was pushing the Ferrari hard when his alternator failed late in the race.
When, following the race, Raikkonen expressed his frustration at it taking so long for Lotus to win, one team member privately expressed the view that he would be better focused on beating Grosjean before moaning about not winning yet.
Since then, though, Raikkonen has upped his game and in the race in Hungary he was fantastic, the middle stint there that lifted him from fifth place to potential victor one of the most impressive pieces of driving all season.
Had Raikkonen not made a mess of qualifying, and taken the front row slot he should have earned rather than the fifth place he did, he might well have won. The same can be said of Bahrain, where a decision to save tyres for the race left him down in 11th place on the grid and with too much to do.
Grosjean, too, must be considered a potential Spa winner. Despite making too many errors, he has been all confidence and commitment this year.
He has looked a different driver on his return to F1 in 2012 from the haunted figure who was demoralised by Alonso during his first half-season at Renault in 2009, after which he was dropped.
The high expectations for Lotus at Spa are partly based on the car's inherent qualifies - a factor in its general competitiveness this year has been strong performance in fast corners, and Spa is full of them.
As well as that, though, is that innovation mentioned earlier. In Hungary, and in Germany the week before, Lotus trialled a clever system aimed at boosting the team's straight-line speed without compromising its performance in other areas.
Like the DRS overtaking aid featured on all the cars, the Lotus system affects the rear wing to reduce drag.
It works by channelling air from scoops behind the driver's head to the rear wing, which this extra air then 'stalls', reducing the downforce the wing creates and therefore its drag, boosting straight-line speed.
What is not clear is when exactly the Lotus system comes into play.
Is it independent of the DRS, as some believe, and therefore active above a pre-set car velocity and usable at all times, including in the race when DRS use is restricted to a specific zone?
Or is it, as BBC F1 technical analyst Gary Anderson believes, linked to the DRS and simply an extra boost to the car's speed when that system is employed, like the system Mercedes have been using but without the inherent compromises that team have discovered?
Either way, it could be a significant boost to Lotus's chances in Spa. Lotus have yet to use the system outside free practice, and this weekend they will again try it out on Friday before making a decision whether to race it.
For all the talk of Lotus, though, a win for them is a very long way from a foregone conclusion. Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren will be as strong as ever on a track that should suit all their cars.
In fact, it will be a particularly interesting weekend all round.
Which teams have made best use of the mid-season break to develop their cars?
Have Ferrari made the step forward in performance they seemed in Hungary to need if Alonso - unquestionably the stand-out driver of the season so far - is to hang on to his championship lead?
Can McLaren maintain the upward momentum they showed in Germany and Hungary after a brief slump?
Will Red Bull finally unlock the potential of what has looked, on balance, overall the fastest car?
The climax of one of the sport's greatest seasons, a hyper-intense period of nine races in three months, starts here.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/08/raikkonen_favourite_to_taste_v.html
Mike Fisher Giancarlo Fisichella John Fitch Christian Fittipaldi Emerson Fittipaldi
Source: http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/grand-am-mazda-unveils-mazda6-diesel-gx-rolex-series-concept/
Jo Schlesser Bernd Schneider Rudolf Schoeller Rob Schroeder Michael Schumacher
Source: http://adamcooperf1.com/2012/11/25/rbr-renamed-infiniti-red-bull-racing-in-new-deal/
George Constantine John Cordts David Coulthard Piers Courage Chris Craft
Mitsubishi has just unveiled the 2014 Outlander at the 2012 Los Angeles Auto Show. The 2014 Outlander will receive an updated exterior and a new engine, featuring a new version of Mitsubishi?s advanced MIVEC continuously-variable valve lift timing system for increased fuel economy. According to Mitsubishi these updates will make the new Outlander the most fuel-efficient CUVs with standard 7-passenger seating in the North American market.
The 2014 Outlander has received a fresh new contemporary face that is both appealing and functional with reduced aerodynamic drag. The SUV is also 200 pounds lighter than the current Outlander. The 2014 Mitsubishi Outlander will go on sale in 2013 and will be offered in three trim levels: ES, Se and GT.
Under the hood Mitsubishi has placed a choice of either a 2.4-liter 4-cylinder engine or a 3.0-liter V-6 engine combined with either a continuously-variable transmission or a 6-speed automatic transmission.
Updated 11/28/2012: This review has been updated with the official details, images and specs.
Mitsubishi Outlander originally appeared on topspeed.com on Wednesday, 28 November 2012 14:00 EST.
Source: http://www.topspeed.com/cars/mitsubishi/2014-mitsubishi-outlander-ar138084.html
Brian Naylor Mike Nazaruk Tiff Needell Jac Nelleman Patrick Neve