It is an awful irony that it has taken Robert Kubica's horrific crash in a rally car on Sunday to bring him to the attention of the wider world.
Despite four and a half seasons in Formula 1, the 26-year-old Pole was not exactly a household name. Such is the lot of a grand prix driver who does not find himself in a front-running car.
But Kubica is very different from the other men pounding around in the midfield, to whom the wider TV audience pay only scant attention while focusing on the big names battling it out at the front.
This is a man who is increasingly regarded as one of the very finest racing drivers in the world - someone who, as David Coulthard put it on Monday, can be talked about in the same breath as the likes of Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton and the new world champion Sebastian Vettel.
Kubica has won only one grand prix - a superb drive for BMW Sauber in Canada in 2008 - but there was an ever-growing number of F1 observers awaiting with increasing impatience the time he would get his hands on a competitive car.
The signs have been there for some time, little snapshots that made you sit up and take notice that this was someone out of the ordinary.
In 2006, his pace as BMW Sauber's test driver effectively ended the career of 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve - when the Canadian fell out with the team, they needed no encouragement to sack him and replace him with Kubica, knowing that he was not only cheaper, but significantly faster.
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Despite zero experience, Kubica was brilliant in the second half of that year, immediately out-pacing his team-mate Nick Heidfeld, a veteran of more than six seasons, and taking a podium finish in only his third grand prix.
Kubica's driving style - turn in early and on the brakes, demanding a lot from the outside front tyre - meant he was affected badly by the switch to a single tyre supplier, and consequent lower grip levels, in 2007.
But he bounced back with a bang in 2008, driving with stunning consistency and pace to lead the championship after that win in Canada mid-season.
What happened next rankles with Kubica to this day.
BMW's plan was to use 2008 as a building year for a full title assault in 2009, and they stuck to it resolutely, easing off development of their race car just as they had got themselves to the top of the pile, in order to concentrate on their next model.
Their logic was that the car was not really quick enough to win the title against the superior machines of McLaren and Ferrari, that they were only leading the championship because Kubica had been more consistent than his rivals - and that the top teams would eventually get their act together.

Kubica missed only one race after emerging unhurt from this crash in 2007. Photo: Getty
Kubica didn't see it that way - he saw a team giving up a golden opportunity to win the championship. Even with BMW's decision, he ended up finishing third, in contention until the penultimate race.
BMW's intransigence - matched, it has to be said, by Kubica's stubbornness - fatally damaged the driver's relationship with the team, and is almost certainly one reason behind his generally lacklustre 2009 season, when Heidfeld more or less matched him.
Even then, though, there were flashes of genius from Kubica, and last season, following his move to Renault, the doubters became less and less.
The 2010 Renault was not a great car, and had no business mixing it at the front with the Red Bulls, Ferraris and McLarens.
But Kubica performed miracles to qualify it in the top three at Monaco, Spa and Suzuka, the three tracks where a driver's input is most important, where a great driver can transcend the level of his car.
How good is he?
Among his fellow drivers, there has never been any doubt about Kubica's quality. Hamilton regards him as a future world champion - Kubica was the Englishman's main rival in their karting days as teenagers; Alonso has been quoted referring to him as the best driver in the world.
It is also a little known fact that, when Vettel was an inexperienced BMW test driver in 2007, Kubica was an average of about 0.4secs quicker than him.
At Renault, they adore him - technical director James Allison was effusive in a profile of Kubica my colleague Mark Hughes wrote for this website last season.
Allison, who has also worked with Alonso, described Kubica as "one of those very, very top guys where you know that if the car is not running at the front it's because of the car, not him", adding that he was "incredibly fast, won't make mistakes under pressure and will plough on for lap after lap at a really good pace".
Ferrari, too, have noticed his ability. He came very close to replacing Felipe Massa when the Brazilian suffered a fractured skull in a crash in Hungary in 2009, missing out only because he was too big for the car.
The interest remains. And before Sunday, most in F1 expected Kubica to replace Massa eventually, either at the end of this year or next.
Even a Ferrari drive, you suspect, would not change him. Kubica is totally unaffected by fame, has a complete lack of interest in self-promotion and is unimpressed by the razzmatazz of F1.
It now remains to be seen whether he will ever sit in the Ferrari that appears to have his name on it.
F1 drivers are renowned for their near-miraculous ability to recover from terrible injuries - they are to a man very fit and tremendously determined. And as someone close to him said on Monday, Kubica is also "totally stubborn". He will need all his single-mindedness to fight back after this.
But he has done it before. After breaking his left arm in 13 places when a passenger in a road-car crash early in 2003, doctors said he would be out for between six months and a year. Three months later he made his Formula Three debut and won.
Equally, after surviving virtually unscathed a horrific barrel-roll in the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, doctors advised him to sit out the US Grand Prix seven days later. He was back for the following event in France, and qualified and finished fourth.
On Monday, the initial prognosis was about as positive as you could expect in the circumstances. Nevertheless, with such serious injuries, it seems likely that Kubica will be out for most of the season and replacing him is going to be impossible for Renault. There are simply not any drivers of comparable quality around.
Renault have two 'third drivers' in Bruno Senna and Romain Grosjean, but both are inexperienced and unproven, just like Kubica's team-mate, the Russian Vitaly Petrov. Will a team with aspirations of winning a couple of races this year feel they can go into a full season with a driver line-up like that?
The other option is to take someone experienced. They could potentially try to buy 2010 Williams driver Nico Hulkenberg out of his reserve driver contract with Force India. And Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi, rejected by Force India this season despite having a contract, is also available.
But the obvious contender is Heidfeld, F1's Mr Consistency, who may not set the world on fire, but can be relied upon to be decently quick and score regular points.
Whoever it is, they have a tough act to follow.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/02/it_is_an_awful_irony.html
Tom Walkinshaw, who has died of cancer aged 64, was one of the most powerful personalities in motorsport for nearly 30 years and, latterly, an influential figure in English rugby.
Walkinshaw's famous TWR racing team won championships in touring cars and sportscars, as well as claiming the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1988, giving Jaguar its first win in the race for more than 30 years in the process.
But Formula 1, motorsport's pinnacle, proved a tougher challenge. Although the Scot was instrumental in the success of the Benetton team with Michael Schumacher from 1992-4, his attempts to conquer it with his own team eventually led to his downfall and exit from top-level motor racing.
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When Walkinshaw joined Benetton in 1991, after nearly two decades of often controversial successes in touring cars and sportscars, his reputation preceded him.
He was known as an uncompromising and controversial character whose granite jaw reflected his determination - he pushed things to the limit, didn't mind who he upset to get his way and used his imposing physical presence to its full effect.
Walkinshaw was not a tall man but he was immensely broad and stocky, and he was not afraid to employ his physical strength to his own ends.
At a sportscar race once, he sought out a journalist to whose reporting he had taken exception, dragged him across the pit lane and hung him over the pit wall as cars passed by at nearly 200mph while he verbally harangued him.
But Walkinshaw had brains as well as brawn. He was a very competent racing driver in touring cars in the 1970s but he was a far better team boss.
One of the people he employed at Jaguar was Ross Brawn, later to transform Ferrari into the most efficient winning machine in F1 history, but then an ambitious young designer.
Walkinshaw took him on to apply F1 expertise to sportscars and the result was a game-changing car that won the world sportscar championship.
With that conquered, only F1 remained and the flamboyant new Benetton team boss Flavio Briatore, an intimidating character himself, decided that Walkinshaw and Brawn were the men he needed to turn Benetton from also-rans to winners. Walkinshaw was installed as engineering director, Brawn as technical director.
It didn't take long for Walkinshaw's ruthlessness to emerge.
He had witnessed Schumacher's talents driving for Mercedes in sportscars and when the 22-year-old German made an electrifying F1 debut for Jordan at the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix, Walkinshaw told Briatore this was the driver they needed. By the next race in Italy Schumacher was in the cockpit of a Benetton, the fact that he had binding contract with Jordan a minor inconvenience.
Together, Benetton and Schumacher made a formidable team and success was not long coming - by 1994 they were world champions. But, just as in the other categories in which Walkinshaw had competed, the whiff of controversy followed him to F1.
Benetton were accused of cheating. They were found to have illegal driver-aid software in their cars, but were not punished because the sport's governing body, the FIA, could not prove it had been used. Then, after a refuelling fire during the German Grand Prix, Benetton were found guilty of taking a filter out of their fuel hose without authorisation.

Benetton's 1994 pit fire led to the end of Walkinshaw's career with the team
They blamed it on a "junior member of staff", but the rumour was that Walkinshaw had authorised it.
Benetton agreed with the FIA to part company with certain unidentified staff as an act of good faith. It was an open secret that a deal had been brokered behind closed doors that Walkinshaw would leave the company at the end of the year.
He moved first to run Benetton-linked Ligier, before in early 1996 taking over Arrows.
Such was the regard in which Walkinshaw was held that he was expected to make a success of a team that had never won a race in its 20-year history.
He pulled off a coup by convincing world champion Damon Hill to join the team for 1997 but the car was uncompetitive. Hill took a somewhat freak second place in Hungary but left the team at the end of the year.
From then on, it was largely all downhill, despite a few flashes of hope, namely when investment bank Morgan Grenfell bought into the team in 1998 and Walkinshaw signed a high-profile sponsorship deal with mobile phone network Orange in 2000.
Generally, his Arrows years were a struggle against the odds, and they ended in 2002 with the ignominy of a High Court battle with Morgan Grenfell and a damning judgement, in which Mr Justice Lightman described proposals Walkinshaw had made trying to ensure the survival of the team as "underhand and improper, indeed downright dishonest".
Why did it go wrong for him in F1?
Some said Walkinshaw too often had his eye off the ball, concentrating on his other business interests, such as his TWR engineering group and Gloucester Rugby Club, to the detriment of his F1 team.
Walkinshaw found money and new partners hard to come by, despite his long history in the car and motorsport industries - or perhaps because of it, some believed.
Walkinshaw was a hard-nosed businessman and sportsman, always viewed as the ultimate survivor, the man who could be guaranteed to pull off the last-minute saving deal.
But his failure with Arrows spelt the end of his association with top-level motorsport, although he did continue to run a touring car team in Australia.
He turned his business acumen and tough negotiating skills to a new role in rugby.
Related or not, the collapse of Arrows coincided with Walkinshaw's tenure as chairman of Premier Rugby, the top-flight clubs' umbrella body, from 1998-2002.
Later, he led the clubs' team negotiating with the Rugby Football Union over the release of England players, the details of which are now enshrined in an eight-year agreement that has largely ended what for a while were very bitter wrangles over the management of the men playing for the national side.
As chairman of Gloucester, he is remembered fondly for pumping in lots of money and keeping the team at the forefront of the game, even if he never quite achieved his ambitions either domestically or in Europe.
Walkinshaw was a complex figure who aroused mixed emotions but, although he had a dark side, plenty of people will remember him as a warm-hearted and generous man.
BBC F1 analyst Martin Brundle, whose long relationship with Walkinshaw included winning Le Mans and the world sportscar title, says: "He was a mentor to me.
"I wrote to him and asked him for a drive when he didn't know me from Adam and he gave me a chance. If he hadn't done that, I'd still be selling Toyotas in West Norfolk, for sure. He was an entrepreneurial racer and a great tactician."
And Hill, now president of the British Racing Drivers' Club that owns Silverstone, adds: "He was a very big-hearted guy who put everything he had into motor racing in all its forms. He loved motorsport and he liked business, too.
"Tom had competitive spirit and there were a lot of good things about him. He genuinely wanted to compete. He wanted things to turn out right.
"I certainly believed in Tom and his sincere desire to build a team. But it didn't work out.
"He was a major player in motorsport for a long time and that will be his testimony."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2010/12/tom_walkinshaw_who_has_died.html



Kubica suffers multiple fractures By Jonathan Noble, David Evans, Michele Lostia Sunday, February 6th 2011, 14:23 GMT Robert Kubica looks set to miss the start of the new Formula 1 season after suffering multiple fractures to his right arm, leg and hand in a crash on the Ronde di Andora rally on Sunday. The Polish driver was airlifted to hospital on Sunday morning following a high-speed crash that took place 4.6 kilometres into the opening stage of the event, on a stage near the village of Testico in Italy. Kubica is understood to have swiped a wall and hit a crash barrier in a Super 2000 Skoda Fabia on the first stage of the rally - which he was competing in shortly after completing the first week of pre-season F1 testing with Renault at Valencia. Related posts:Source: http://doxcar.com/f1-kubica-suffers-multiple-fractures/
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The first race of the 2011 season is still two months away, but the fight for a competitive advantage in Formula 1 is still raging away behind the scenes.
As their engineers put the finishing touches to their new cars in time for the start of pre-season testing next month, team bosses are trying to thrash out a new cost-saving agreement. And it's getting a bit nasty.
Rivals - almost without exception, I'm told - believe Red Bull exceeded en route to winning the world title last year the limitations laid out in the document that defines how teams commit their budgets. They also claim that Red Bull are blocking a new version of the so-called Resource Restriction Agreement to take the sport through to 2017, where the current one runs only to 2012.
One insider at a rival team said Red Bull had been "flouting" the RRA. This is quite a serious accusation, as it effectively claims Red Bull either spent longer developing the aerodynamics of their car, employed more staff, or spent more money - or all three - than they were allowed to. In other words, they had an unfair advantage.
Red Bull deny outright that they overspent in 2010, and insist they are objecting to the revised agreement only because it is flawed in its current form and they want to ensure it is "fair and equitable". More of which in a moment.
"We've worked in accordance with the RRA limits since they were introduced," Red Bull team principal Christian Horner told BBC Sport. "With tremendous hard work and internal efficiencies, we believe we've absolutely adhered to it.
"Red Bull has committed its budgets wisely and it's obviously surprising that people will feel that way, but it's inevitable, I guess, when you're at the front and winning races."
No one will go on the record to confirm their suspicions about Red Bull, but Virgin Racing chief executive officer Graeme Lowdon, while making it clear he does not know about Red Bull's budget, says: "On something as fundamental as this, on something that's there to make the whole business you're in sustainable, if someone was to even breach the spirit of that, then that's extremely disappointing.
"I cannot see how anyone can level a criticism at an RRA. If it made a worse show, or watered it down, then there would be a case to answer. But it doesn't so it's very disappointing if teams ignore something as fundamental as this."
In many ways, this financial dispute echoes the technical rows that enveloped Red Bull in 2010.
Unable to explain or understand how the RB6 car was so fast, rivals first accused Red Bull of having an illegal ride-height control system, and then of an overly flexible front wing. Red Bull insisted the car was completely legal, and the FIA, F1's governing body, never found otherwise.

Horner finds Red Bull in the middle of another controversy about 2010. Photo: Getty
"We expect other teams to potentially challenge [whether we have over-spent]," Horner says, "as they have done on front wings and ride heights and everything else in the course of last year. But we don't have any issue.
"Red Bull probably has the third or fourth biggest budget in F1. We spent prudently and have achieved great efficiency within the factory, and we have to top that in 2011."
This row has come up in the context of negotiations over revising ways of controlling F1's costs. Keeping a lid on budgets is, along with ensuring the racing remains as good as possible, one of the central themes for F1 stake-holders at the moment, as the sport's bosses seek to ensure it remains both compelling for its audience and affordable for its competitors in a difficult economic climate.
The RRA is the document the teams drew up in 2009 to control costs in F1. It defines a series of limitations on resources, getting stricter through 2010, 2011 and 2012, and the penalties for exceeding them. But it was always meant as a stepping-stone to a longer agreement.In the current agreement, there is a sliding scale of penalties covering the following main areas of resource commitment:
The penalties were based on a sliding scale. For example, a breach of up to 5% is punished by having that same amount taken off your resource allocation for the next year; a breach of 5-10% means having 1.1 times that amount taken off; and so on.
The new document - the fundamentals of which were largely agreed at a meeting at the Singapore Grand Prix last September - changes that.
One team principal, who did not wish to be identified, said that the new RRA relaxes the restrictions on resources - teams can spend a bit more money and employ a few more staff - and in return the policing is stricter, both in terms of how teams' spending is analysed and the penalties for exceeding the limits.
But the detail is proving problematic, with Red Bull in particular unhappy about the new document as it stands.
Horner says his objections are rooted in ensuring the new RRA, which would run until 2017, does what it is intended to do.
"The RRA is a positive thing for F1," he says. "I think a solution can be found for the outstanding issues, it just needs some sensible discussion between the teams, because the thought of an unrestricted spend in F1 is unpalatable for all the teams.
"So it is a matter of achieving transparency and a fair and equitable system between all independent and manufacturer-owned teams so that no party is at an advantage or disadvantage."
"The resource restriction needs to be sorted quite quickly because at the moment it is unclear what rules we are working to in 2011 in many respects, so it's important a solution is found and I think one will be found."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/01/f1_teams_battle_over_cost-cutt.html
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Behind The Scenes With NASCAR's New Ad Take a look behind the scenes of NASCAR's latest ad, Wild West-style Tags: NASCAR, Kurt Busch, Carl Edwards, Denny HamlinBehind The Scenes With NASCAR's New Ad CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Kevin Harvick stares steely-eyed into the camera, his eyes focused straight ahead and his right hand wrapped firmly around the handle of the six-shooter in his holster."Give us a s***-eating grin," the director tells the driver.Harvick has no problem getting into character, giving the camera one of those play-with-your-mind looks he gave Denny Hamlin often during the final three races of the 2010 Chase, the kind John Wayne and Clint Eastwood so naturally gave before gunning somebody down.Yes, Harvick is playing the role of a cowboy Related posts:Source: http://doxcar.com/daytona-500-commercials-give-super-bowl-commercials-run-for-their-money/
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