A new twist in the long-running row over the use of the Lotus name in Formula 1 has emerged with the announcement that the owners of Team Lotus have bought niche sportscar manufacturer Caterham.
Tony Fernandes and his partners see Caterham, which makes replicas of the old Lotus Seven two-seater open-top sportscar, as a company with historic links and "synergies" with Team Lotus that allows them to realise their ambition of diversifying into making road cars.
Their original plan was to do that with Group Lotus, the company that markets Lotus sportscars, but as Fernandes puts it: "That obviously didn't turn out very well."
What the Malaysian businessman, and owner of budget airline Air Asia, is referring to is the increasingly bitter dispute between him and Group Lotus that has ended up in the High Court.
When Fernandes and his partners first set up what was then called the Lotus Racing F1 team last year, it was with the blessing of Group Lotus, which licensed them the name. But in the course of 2010 Group Lotus's new chairman Dany Bahar decided he wanted to go his own way in F1.
He terminated Fernandes' licence, and switched instead to a sponsorship deal with the Renault team. Fernandes, seeing this coming, bought the rights to the historic Team Lotus name as a fall-back.
Both issues - the termination of the licence and the ownership of the Team Lotus name - are wrapped up in a court case that was heard last month, with a verdict expected early in May.
Fernandes is widely expected to win the rights to continue to use Team Lotus. He bought it legitimately from its previous owner, David Hunt, brother of the late world champion James, and Group Lotus has always acted in the past as if it knew it did not own the name.
Nevertheless, buying Caterham does provide Fernandes with an interesting fall-back option should the court case go against him. Now he owns his own car company, he could re-name the F1 team after it should he want to.

Team Lotus owner Tony Fernandes now has Caterham in his business portfolio
For now, though, he says that is not an option. Fernandes told BBC Sport that he is "absolutely not" going to change the name of Team Lotus. Although he does add: "Obviously we have to wait for the verdict to see exactly what has been decided. But we see a very natural link between Team Lotus and Caterham, and they can be synergistic and promote each other, and there is some DNA between the two anyway. It's not like we've bought a brand that has no association with Team Lotus at all. It's just the opposite."
The Caterham name will, though, soon appear on the Team Lotus F1 cars - although exactly when and how has yet to be decided - and the company will eventually contribute to the Lotus budget as a sponsor.
Assuming he retains the rights to Team Lotus, that still leaves Fernandes in the sticky position of providing free promotion to a company with which he is in dispute and has no links.
Unsurprisingly, he did not want to get into that on the day of his big announcement, but he could not resist a little snipe or two at Bahar.
Fernandes says he sees Caterham as very much following the legacy of the late Lotus founder Colin Chapman. "In some ways," he says, "we have reunited the Chapman history. Lotus is all about lightweight, more is less. That is all the terminology we like, and it fits with F1. We feel there is a huge opportunity for Caterham in a market no one is really looking at right now."
By that, he means lightweight, affordable sportscars that are within reach of ordinary people. This was Chapman's approach, and one which, Fernandes says, "certain people have abandoned". That is a reference to Bahar's plans to take Lotus upmarket and challenge Porsche and Ferrari with his mooted five new Lotus models by 2015.So far, the dispute between the two Lotuses has not reached the race tracks of F1.
Team Lotus started this season with chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne setting ambitious targets of catching Renault by the end of the season, but that looks out of reach for now - Renault have started the season strongly enough to set their own difficult goal, of beating Ferrari to third place in the constructors' championship.
But Team Lotus have also started the season well. The car has had reliability problems, but it also has underlying pace, and in the last race in China they beat established teams for the first time since entering F1 at the beginning of last year, with Heikki Kovalainen finishing ahead of a Sauber and a Williams.
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Kovalainen's performance is a clear indicator that Lotus's more realistic target, of scoring points and mixing it with the established teams, is achievable.
Fernandes himself has his feet firmly on the ground. "You build things properly and with the right structure and things will fall into place," he says. "My target this year was to maintain 10th, and hopefully sneak a few points along the way. That is still my target.
"It is beginning to feel more realistic now, but one can't build a challenging F1 team in two years. We are competing against guys who have been there for 30 years but obviously the team smell big steps of improvement. They smell points.
"I never want to kill confidence, I encourage it, but I am also a realist and we are competing against nine guys who have been doing it for years and are very good at it.
"But if you'd asked me do I think at Turkey (the next race on 8 May) you'd be where you are, I wouldn't have believed it.
"We've got a good package and good people, we have put all the infrastructure in place.
"We're working on a new wind tunnel; that's the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and I think if you put all the pieces of the puzzle together then the results will come in good time."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/04/lotus_f1_row_takes_new_twist.html
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Lewis Hamilton was fighting back the tears as he prepared to go out on to the podium after winning the Chinese Grand Prix. It had, he said, felt like "an eternity" since his last victory, in the Belgian Grand Prix last August. After he has come down to earth, he might well think it was worth the wait. This was - Martin Brundle and David Coulthard agreed - one of the greatest performances of Hamilton's career.
A thrilling race, in which it was impossible to pick a winner until very close to the end, put an end to Sebastian Vettel's domination of the 2011 season. From looking like his Red Bull had the pace to win every race, the world champion now knows he faces a fight.
From the very beginning of the season, it has looked like Hamilton would be the man giving the Red Bulls their closest challenge, but events had transpired in the previous two races to prevent him taking the fight to Vettel.
In China, though, Hamilton finally got the chance he had been waiting for and the result was one of the most exciting Formula 1 races for a very long time.
It ebbed and flowed, the advantage swaying one way and then the other between four teams and five different drivers, all coming together in a thrilling final few laps as the various strategies chosen by the different teams merged.
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What allowed it all to happen was both Hamilton and team-mate Jenson Button beating Vettel, who started from pole position, away from the grid. That demoted the German to third place on the first lap and prevented him from unleashing the full pace of the Red Bull and building an advantage he could then defend for the rest of the race.
Instead, Vettel spent the first part of the race bottled up behind the McLarens and from that position Red Bull made what eventually turned out to be a critical error - to do only two pit stops compared to the three of McLaren.
For a long time, it looked like it would work - starting from when Button made the astonishing error of stopping at the Red Bull pit instead of his McLaren one as he and Vettel came in for the first time.
That put Vettel ahead of both McLarens, into clear air and seemingly on course to cruise to victory. But it soon became clear it would not be as simple as that. He did not close on the leading Mercedes of the impressive Nico Rosberg as quickly as might have been expected, and neither was he pulling away from Felipe Massa's Ferrari behind him.
As the race developed, it soon became clear that it was turning into a classic F1 strategy battle - two stops versus three.
Had this been last year, with more durable tyres, the two-stoppers - Vettel and Massa - would have won out, as they were in front by the time all the leading runners had completed the stops.
But the deliberately rapid degradation of the new Pirelli tyres means that races are no longer about track position going into the final stages. Because the tyres can lose their edge so quickly, they are about who has the most grip in the closing laps. It is no good being in front if you do not have the grip to defend your position.
That created a brilliant spectacle - as was the idea when Pirelli were asked to design tyres in this way. Once everyone had completed their pit stops, Hamilton was in fourth place, and on tyres with much more grip than Vettel, Massa and Rosberg in the first three positions.
Hamilton's passing moves on those three got better and better - peaking with a superbly audacious dive down the inside of Vettel into the 150mph Turn Seven to take the lead. It was, as even Vettel had to admit, "a good move".
But arguably the best of all was the overtake that made the victory possible - taking what at the time was second place from Button into Turn One on lap 35, with 21 laps to go.
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It is not the easiest of places to pass - there is no sharp braking into that corner; the cars dive in and slow progressively as it gets tighter and tighter through nearly a complete circle. Hamilton seemed to catch Button unawares and there was a nervy moment when the older man suddenly realised his team-mate was there.
Button had a little wobble as he made room for Hamilton, and up on the pit wall team principal Martin Whitmarsh had his heart in his mouth. But it worked out and Hamilton had three laps to make up some time before his final stop.
"It felt absolutely incredible and was probably one of the best races I've ever competed in," Hamilton told BBC Sport's F1 Forum after the race. "It was one of the best grand prix wins I can remember."
It was indeed a quite superb drive, probably his best in the dry, and one that certainly ranks up there with his wet-weather wins at Japan 2007, Silverstone 2008 and Spa last year.
It was also a timely reminder that for all Vettel's impressive run of wins and pole positions at the end of last year and the beginning of this, there are a few other drivers out there who are at least a match for him if they are provided with the right equipment and circumstances.
Among them, Hamilton is right up at the top - and this win has closed the gap to Vettel in the championship to 21 points. Suddenly, a season that had looked poised to be a Red Bull walkover has come alive.
The key themes of the narrative are still not absolutely clear.
One, it seems, will be Red Bull's struggles with Kers. These again proved an Achilles heel for the team - Webber struggled with the system through the weekend, and it malfunctioned on Vettel's car in the race, just as it did in Malaysia a week ago.
Another will clearly be the impact of the tyres and the controversial moveable rear wing, or DRS as it is known in F1 jargon. For ultra-purists, there is an argument that the racing, while exciting, feels a little artificial at times.
As Webber, whose fabulous recovery drive ironically made him one of the biggest beneficiaries of the massive grip differences between old and new tyres, put it: "I'm still not a huge fan of how it is; sometimes the overtakes are not all that genuine because the guys don't have anything to fight back with."
But after a race as good as this, how much does that matter?
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/04/brilliant_hamilton_brings_seas.html
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There is so much to look forward to over the next few races. First there is the Turkish Grand Prix, on a track very popular with the drivers. After that it's on to the true start of the European season in Spain. Then the incomparable Monaco Grand Prix and unique Canada, which always seems to produce a fantastic race, before I am back on this blog after the European Grand Prix in Valencia, which to be brutally honest has a track that does not live up to what is a great city.
I'm sure we're in for some fascinating action. In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy my preview of the next five races.
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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/murraywalker/2011/05/there_is_so_much_to.html
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Lewis Hamilton was fighting back the tears as he prepared to go out on to the podium after winning the Chinese Grand Prix. It had, he said, felt like "an eternity" since his last victory, in the Belgian Grand Prix last August. After he has come down to earth, he might well think it was worth the wait. This was - Martin Brundle and David Coulthard agreed - one of the greatest performances of Hamilton's career.
A thrilling race, in which it was impossible to pick a winner until very close to the end, put an end to Sebastian Vettel's domination of the 2011 season. From looking like his Red Bull had the pace to win every race, the world champion now knows he faces a fight.
From the very beginning of the season, it has looked like Hamilton would be the man giving the Red Bulls their closest challenge, but events had transpired in the previous two races to prevent him taking the fight to Vettel.
In China, though, Hamilton finally got the chance he had been waiting for and the result was one of the most exciting Formula 1 races for a very long time.
It ebbed and flowed, the advantage swaying one way and then the other between four teams and five different drivers, all coming together in a thrilling final few laps as the various strategies chosen by the different teams merged.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
What allowed it all to happen was both Hamilton and team-mate Jenson Button beating Vettel, who started from pole position, away from the grid. That demoted the German to third place on the first lap and prevented him from unleashing the full pace of the Red Bull and building an advantage he could then defend for the rest of the race.
Instead, Vettel spent the first part of the race bottled up behind the McLarens and from that position Red Bull made what eventually turned out to be a critical error - to do only two pit stops compared to the three of McLaren.
For a long time, it looked like it would work - starting from when Button made the astonishing error of stopping at the Red Bull pit instead of his McLaren one as he and Vettel came in for the first time.
That put Vettel ahead of both McLarens, into clear air and seemingly on course to cruise to victory. But it soon became clear it would not be as simple as that. He did not close on the leading Mercedes of the impressive Nico Rosberg as quickly as might have been expected, and neither was he pulling away from Felipe Massa's Ferrari behind him.
As the race developed, it soon became clear that it was turning into a classic F1 strategy battle - two stops versus three.
Had this been last year, with more durable tyres, the two-stoppers - Vettel and Massa - would have won out, as they were in front by the time all the leading runners had completed the stops.
But the deliberately rapid degradation of the new Pirelli tyres means that races are no longer about track position going into the final stages. Because the tyres can lose their edge so quickly, they are about who has the most grip in the closing laps. It is no good being in front if you do not have the grip to defend your position.
That created a brilliant spectacle - as was the idea when Pirelli were asked to design tyres in this way. Once everyone had completed their pit stops, Hamilton was in fourth place, and on tyres with much more grip than Vettel, Massa and Rosberg in the first three positions.
Hamilton's passing moves on those three got better and better - peaking with a superbly audacious dive down the inside of Vettel into the 150mph Turn Seven to take the lead. It was, as even Vettel had to admit, "a good move".
But arguably the best of all was the overtake that made the victory possible - taking what at the time was second place from Button into Turn One on lap 35, with 21 laps to go.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
It is not the easiest of places to pass - there is no sharp braking into that corner; the cars dive in and slow progressively as it gets tighter and tighter through nearly a complete circle. Hamilton seemed to catch Button unawares and there was a nervy moment when the older man suddenly realised his team-mate was there.
Button had a little wobble as he made room for Hamilton, and up on the pit wall team principal Martin Whitmarsh had his heart in his mouth. But it worked out and Hamilton had three laps to make up some time before his final stop.
"It felt absolutely incredible and was probably one of the best races I've ever competed in," Hamilton told BBC Sport's F1 Forum after the race. "It was one of the best grand prix wins I can remember."
It was indeed a quite superb drive, probably his best in the dry, and one that certainly ranks up there with his wet-weather wins at Japan 2007, Silverstone 2008 and Spa last year.
It was also a timely reminder that for all Vettel's impressive run of wins and pole positions at the end of last year and the beginning of this, there are a few other drivers out there who are at least a match for him if they are provided with the right equipment and circumstances.
Among them, Hamilton is right up at the top - and this win has closed the gap to Vettel in the championship to 21 points. Suddenly, a season that had looked poised to be a Red Bull walkover has come alive.
The key themes of the narrative are still not absolutely clear.
One, it seems, will be Red Bull's struggles with Kers. These again proved an Achilles heel for the team - Webber struggled with the system through the weekend, and it malfunctioned on Vettel's car in the race, just as it did in Malaysia a week ago.
Another will clearly be the impact of the tyres and the controversial moveable rear wing, or DRS as it is known in F1 jargon. For ultra-purists, there is an argument that the racing, while exciting, feels a little artificial at times.
As Webber, whose fabulous recovery drive ironically made him one of the biggest beneficiaries of the massive grip differences between old and new tyres, put it: "I'm still not a huge fan of how it is; sometimes the overtakes are not all that genuine because the guys don't have anything to fight back with."
But after a race as good as this, how much does that matter?
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/04/brilliant_hamilton_brings_seas.html
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