The following is a summary of the rumours and stories that were circulating over the weekend at Monza. There was a lot of rubbish being spouted in the paddock, but some very interesting developments as well. There were two key things that happened off the track at Monza: the first was the decision by Mercedes not to supply Red Bull with engines in 2016. This was no great surprise, although there has been no actual confirmation of the decision, as there is no great PR logic in announcing that something that might happen has not happened. The Stuttgart company has been under pressure in recent weeks from Bernie Ecclestone to agree to provide engines, with Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz making lots of serious-sounding noises about quitting the sport if he could not get a competitive engine. This may be a bit like a kid wailing because the music stopped and he was let without a chair, but Mateschitz’s theory seems to have been that if you scream enough, someone will give in. Mercedes clearly believes in proper discipline for children and so Dietrich has been sent to bed with no tea.

The good news is that Ferrari will happily give him engines for both of his teams – as long, of course, that he has extracted himself from his Renault contracts. Renault is quite happy to see the back of Red Bull. Renault engines won the team four World titles but when things went wrong the team’s first reaction was to throw Renault under the bus.

This will all likely mean that Mercedes will now be free to provide its engines to Manor, which is keen to grab them.

The second big happening in Monza was that Renault and the Formula One group seem to have got into a bit of a barney (a fight, rather than a purple dinosaur) over how much an historical payment should be. The way things are structured in F1, historical payments are as long as a piece of string. You get what you can negotiate from the Formula One group. Renault obviously feels that it has supported F1 long and hard and should get the same sort of money as a Mercedes, but the CVC fellows, who like to lock themselves away in rooms and sniff money, do not want to part with as much as Renault wants. The problem here is that Renault does not just want money, it needs it, if it is going to save Lotus F1 Team, because a publicly-traded car company with a strong government presence is not generally encouraged to sink money into Formula 1 teams. It is a bit like Carlos Ghosn asking the board to be allowed to buy a million lottery tickets, on the basis that one or more of them might come good. Shareholders like more solid plans. Thus to save Lotus from itself, Renault needs to find money from the commercial rights holder and from the Red Bull settlement. After that the company can help with running costs and can encourage B2B action with companies that do business with Renault. Without money Renault cannot buy either Lotus or Force India and it is hard to imagine that the current owners of either team will be giving away shares… If Renault does not get the money it wants there is a danger that it might simply pull the plug and stomp off to sell Twingos in Macedonia, using sponsorship of billion balls, or whatever.

If everyone was treated fairly and we all knew the way that historical payments worked then these things would not be a problem. It would be a case of take it or leave it, but F1’s commercial structures are rather haphazard and very secret, so we must have such problems until transparency is declared. By all accounts, a number of people who value secrecy will have to disappear if that is to happen.

The other problem, of course, is that CVC Capital Partners is a little annoyed that someone wants another part of its golden goose. They have all been fighting over the beast for a while now and CVC is annoyed that its feathers are ruffled and it is not chucking out the eggs it used to. There is somewhere between zero and no sympathy for CVC in this matter because they have drained the sport of cash, loaded it with debt and led it up blind alleys in order to line its pockets and those of its investors. Small wonder the goose is biting CVC’s bum and trying to chase it out of the farmyard…

If Renault can reach a deal with CVC and everything is stabilised, we will have 11 teams next year. Ferrari will supply five (Ferrari, Sauber, Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Haas), while Mercedes will provide power units for four (Mercedes, Williams, Force India and Manor). Renault will supply its own team and Honda will supply McLaren. There is no sign of anyone else, and eventually someone in F1 is going to work out why this is the case, when the technology is what all the manufacturers want and they are all spending unthinkable sums of money on R&D in order to make greener cars. According to Strategy&, the strategy consulting team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, there were six automobile companies in their list of the top 20 research and development spenders in 2014, with Volkswagen at the top, spending $13.5 billion a year. That is $37 million a day, so there is no question that Volkswagen can afford F1. Toyota is spending $25 million a day on R&D, while GM is on about $20 million a day, with Ford, Honda and Mercedes chasing along behind. Obviously, getting better technology from F1 is an option that is quite attractive, judging by what it costs and the advertising you get while doing it, so one does need to ask: what is the problem? Could it be the governance? The commercial arrangements? The transparency problems?

It is a question that is worth asking.

On the driver front the news that Williams has confirmed Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas meant that Nico Hulkenberg did not have a better choice than Force India and decided not to join the new Haas F1 team. Force India is very positive about keeping Sergio Perez (and his money) but I hear that Checo might be holding off until he knows what will happen at Lotus as joining Renault would put him in a factory team, which should in the long term be able to compete strongly. With Pastor Maldonado still somehow managing to get $50 million a year in sponsorship, Romain Grosjean’s future with the team might suddenly become threatened. And, if Renault does not come to the rescue, it is probably not such a great idea from Romain to stay where he is. This led to suggestions that Grosjean is the man at the top of the Haas F1 list and indeed some have even said that he has signed the deal. The logic of this is fairly sound. Romain wants to get into a top team and he sees the most likely place for him to be at Ferrari when Kimi Raikkonen is finally sent out to grass at the end of next year. If Ferrari can see all his data by way of Haas, they might be more convinced to take him on. The only problem here is that if Max Verstappen has Ferrari engines next year at Toro Rosso, Ferrari will also be able to see how he does…

There was some talk about Mercedes trying to push for Pascal Wehrlein to race for Manor next year, but I spoke to the various parties involved and there has been absolutely no discussion about that. Perhaps there will be at some point, but thus far nothing is happening on that front. There are several other names that are floating around at the moment, notably Kevin Magnussen, who is looking for a ride. He has hopes of Haas, but he could end up elsewhere (or nowhere) depending on the movement of the other drivers. Right now, it is not a comfortable time for him. The name Esteban Gutierrez has come up a lot and he has been talked about a lot in relation to Haas. He has money, experience and some talent and so might be a good choice. Jean-Eric Vergne is another name that is being heard on the market. If Grosjean does leave the Lotus-Renault mess, perhaps a gap might open up for him. There is no sign of any real rumours about Alexander Rossi with Haas, which would be a shame as the Californian driver in the only US driver ready to come into F1. If the Haas team thinks it can parachute a star in from US racing, they are dreaming, but I think that this is unlikely to happen as the team seems to be doing a lot of good things at the moment. We will see. New team owners usually make some pretty big mistakes along the way…

One point of note, despite George Lucas’s woeful performance on the podium at the end of the race, there was US talk show host Charlie Rose lurking in the Mercedes team areas. he seems to be preparing a show focussed on Mercedes-Benz’s F1 activities for PBS.

There was plenty of chatter about the 2016 calendar, but in the finest tradition of these things. Money talks and bullshit walks. The teams are not going to like going racing in December. Some of them are even rumoured to be adding marriage guidance counsellors to their staff as the sport is wiping out some relationships. This leads to increased staff turnover in all the teams because no-one wants to keep up with a lifestyle that sees them away from their nearest and dearest for more than a few years. So youngsters come and go, but the rat of retention is not at all what it used to be when there are 16 races, with the majority of them in Europe…