The desperate attempts to stir up media coverage of the EU and Formula One continue. This is utter rubbish. It is a clear example of fake news being copied and copied by people who don’t bother to check. The fact that the BBC ran it shows that its F1 correspondent, who understands these things, is probably on holiday (it being half term in schools) and someone who doesn’t have a clue is filling in. Certainly his name was not on the story. In the end, however, will a few reports makes any difference? Will the EU suddenly start doing something it doesn’t want nor need to do? No, they will not. It’s just space-filling… The only real news in F1 is that Renault has picked up a Red Bull aerodynamicist who can begin work in the summer. The Pirelli launch in Turin created more questions than answers, but it was odd, weird in fact, that Ferrari did not send its team principal along. It’s only round the corner from Maranello. Lamborghini boss Stefano Donemicali was there, Eric Boullier flew in for McLaren. OK Toto Wolff and Christian Horner might have recorded messages but for Ferrari not to send along Maurizio Arrivabene was just strange. What was he doing? Bolting the cars together? The rumblings among the Italian media at the event were that Ferrari is very worried about its performance this year and its desire to try to get the FIA to stop certain suspension systems is because it does not fully understand what they do and an FIA ruling might throw some more light on the systems. Whether this is true or not is another matter. There are also people saying that the FIA doesn’t really understand the wildly complex systems, but there are some pretty clever engineers at the federation these days so that is probably not the case, although they may still be looking at the details of how these things work in order to figure out if there are any regulatory questions raised. Usually, however, this sort of thing is discussed and cleared in advance by the teams and the FIA so it will be interesting to see if it goes any further. For now, however, all prognostication about relative performance is a waste of time. No-one knows until the cars run against one another in anger – and we may not see that until Melbourne.

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