The arrival of the newest and tallest motor homes in the Formula One paddock is an overt statement of intent by the sport’s youngest team, Force India.

As the series arrives in Asia for the Turkish Grand Prix outside Istanbul on Sunday, Force India provides a glimpse into the sport’s future. It is a case study in how to save and revitalize a team, especially in light of last week’s collapse of the financially struggling Super Aguri team from Japan.

Force India’s hospitality suite is airy, easy to move around in and full of smiling team members and visitors.

“I am very proud of my new motor home, but this motor home with a slow car means nothing,” said Vijay Mallya, the Indian billionaire who owns the racing team, as well as Kingfisher Airlines, Kingfisher beer and other companies. “The car is performing, the motor home is adding to it all, and I think that the message is that on the track and off the track, we are serious in this business.”

The team, then known as Jordan, was third in the series in 1999. It was the last true independent team to win a race the Brazilian Grand Prix in 2003 before it fell on hard times. It was renamed twice more after being sold. Then Mallya bought the team from the Dutch car company Spyker last fall.

“Cricket, which is a religion in India, is for everyone,” Mallya said. “It’s for your staff, for your chauffeur, for your boss, for your maid, for everyone. But there is this breed of youngsters in India who are proud of their success we call them upwardly mobile and aspirational Indians they are earning well, they want to show their wealth, they want to show that they are different.”

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Wanted: someone with a minimum of several hundred million dollars and the stomach for a fight. No reward guaranteed.Super Aguri finally succumbed to the disease that has plagued their two-year run in Formula One a lack of funding last week and are now up for sale.

However, finding a buyer for the team that has regularly punched above its estimated $90 million budget could prove a resurrection too far.

The process could also prove a watershed moment in the sport, which faces an immediate future with only 10 teams and the possibility that could shrink to nine.

Toro Rosso has essentially been a feeder team for Red Bull, using a chassis based on its parent team's design but a Ferrari engine instead of the Renault-powered cars driven by David Coulthard and Mark Webber. This set-up will not be allowed under the new rules.

Super Aguri has been in a similar position, owing Honda up to a $100 million for engines and technical support according to reports.

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Four rounds into the 2008 Formula One World Championship, and there are still many questions to be answered.

What's behind Alonso's impressive form in Spain? How much does McLaren miss the Spaniard's development skills? Will Lewis Hamilton find his way back to the top step of the podium?

 What is seemingly not up for debate, however, is the near-universal fan approval of the removal of traction control and engine-breaking assistance.

 The secretary at my place of work is a lovely woman named Carol. She's in her late 60s now, but she spent the balance of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe watching the likes of Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi, and her personal heartthrob, Jacky Ickx.

On Monday mornings this year, she is all abuzz at the excitement of the previous day's Grand Prix. "Isn't it fantastic," she'll say, "to see the race being decided by the drivers for a change?" I happily concur.

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Of the nearly 200 pictures using motor racing as a backdrop, only a handful are considered classics. Why is that?

One of the reasons is that age-old delicate balance challenge for any genre, where the filmmakers not only capture that specific world but do so with a riveting story. It is the same for motor racing cinema; some capture the speed and danger of the competition but the story is weak, while others provide compelling characters but their efforts on the track are the pits. 

Renny Harlin, director of the 2001 racing drama, “Driven,” points to a couple other reasons, such as financing and a surprisingly tight demographic that prevent more motor racing movies from getting made.
“I don’t think a race car movie is any more expensive to make than other action films, but so few of these movies have worked that studios are hesitant to make them. The audience is also so specific that you can’t count on the same kind of cross over popularity like with other sports movies like baseball or basketball,” notes the filmmaker, who adds, “The irony is that Formula One racing is the second biggest sport in the world, after soccer, but in the U.S. no one watches it. NASCAR, on the other hand, is virtually unknown in the rest of the world, hence financing is a problem.”

But what NASCAR does have is a huge and fanatical domestic following. So where are the motor sport films servicing that free-spending crowd?

Certainly there have been notable stock car films through the years that have provided a different glimpse of that world such as: “The Richard Petty Story,” “Days of Thunder” and “3-The Dale Earnhardt Story,” still nothing has approached classic status in that category of racing.

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The sport of Formula One is always in perpetual motion, as is evidenced by the teams always testing future setups, the FIA and their regulations, and also Formula One Management’s Bernie Eccelstone always throwing a fit when it comes to bringing the sport into new markets and stripping some of the most hallowed tracks in Europe and North America of their races. Little known events occurred at the Barcelona test one week before the Spanish Grand Prix. Some of the teams took part in simulation runs of the new 2009 package and regulations. The 2009 regulations will change the sport quite a bit and usher in a new, exciting era into the sport, and it could not have come at a better time.

    Formula One is arguably THE most watched sport in the world, with the exception of the FIFA World Cup which only occurs every four years. Nearly every country tunes in to watch Sunday grand prix and about 55 million people watch on any given weekend. In the early 2000s during the dominance of Michael Schumacher and Ferrari, however, TV ratings dropped. People would just tune in and see Schumacher winning the race and then they would just simply switch the channel to something else. Now Schumacher is in his second year of retirement and the sport is completely wide open for the taking. A few years back the FIA and F1 Racing polled fans about what they would like to see more of on the track. An overwhelming percentage of 94% of fans said that they would like to see more overtaking in the sport. The FIA seems to agree and has kindly responded with new regulations for the 2009 season.

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Super Aguri, the first all-Japanese Formula One team, called it quits Tuesday due to financial problems, with founder Aguri Suzuki saying he would never return to the "piranha's" sport.

"I have been very happy that I was able to achieve a miracle and become a team owner, but I have to make the difficult decision to withdraw," Suzuki told a news conference.

"The team will be ceasing its racing activities as of today," he said.

The disappearance of Super Aguri means that Formula One is down to 10 teams, with the grid originally supposed to have 12 at the start of the season before the collapse of Prodrive's entry.

Super Aguri was founded as the first all-Japanese team in the Western-dominated sport, achieving a long-held ambition of the 47-year-old racing veteran Suzuki.

But the team struggled after their 2006 debut and suffered a major blow last month when Britain's Magma Group backed out of plans to acquire them.

"If someone gave me 100 billion yen (one billion dollars), then I'd like to keep competing for three years. But real life isn't so easy," Suzuki said.

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Since the rod of iron that controlled Formula One was exchanged for a whip, the sport has appeared to be struggling to maintain its image of order. Caught up in the vacuum are the poor Super Aguri team, who are looking for a saviour and may have run their final grand prix in Spain last weekend.

The Magma Group, backed by Dubai International Capital, the investment company that is trying to buy Liverpool Football Club, has already pulled out of negotiations to take over the team. It could hardly have been encouraged by the scandal around the sadomasochistic orgy involving Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the ruling body.

Another potential buyer has walked away for good. Tony Teixeira, who runs the A1GP series, which is at Brands Hatch this weekend, says he wanted to move into Formula One but has abandoned ideas of buying a team because of rules that could hamper a takeover of Super Aguri.

Mosley wanted to allow “customer teams”, who would buy off-the-peg cars from other teams, to enter the sport. That would open up the grid and allow some new faces into Formula One. But the plan has suffered fierce internal opposition, notably from Williams and Force India, who are prepared to go to law to do away with customer outfits, demanding instead that every team in Formula One manufacture their own cars. David Richards, owner of Prodrive, the British motorsport company, was the first victim, with plans for a new team sunk by the legal challenge.

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They are an eclectic bunch with two things in common: their wealth and love for Formula One.

While the drivers take centre stage these men sit back and pull the strings, building the sport's reach and helping maintain its reputation for consuming and generating large sums of cash.

Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone is the leader of the pack, turning the sport into a global brand through his control of television rights and watching his fortune surge to $4.8 billion as a result.

The self-made Ecclestone left school aged 16 and initially went to work at a gasworks. However he began trading motorcycle parts, building the business into one of Britain's biggest motorcycle dealers.

He first dipped his toe into Formula One in the late 1950s, buying the Connaught team. However, after leaving the sport twice, his real immersion began with the purchase of Brabham in 1972.

In 1974 he helped form the Formula One Contructors' Association (FOCA) and a year later led the group in a battle with the FIA, the sport's governing body, to win a new entry and appearance fee system.

The groups wrestled for commercial control of the sport until 1981, when FOCA won the rights to negotiate television contracts.

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As a technical sport motor racing demands of its participants a close understanding of the technologies that can help them. F1 motor racing is probably second only to the aerospace industry in the application of aerodynamic simulation and wind tunnel technology. It is a testament to the rapid advance of Linux in high performance computing that most teams in Formula 1 have been using Linux systems in their aerodynamic and engine workshops for a number of years.

"Formula One is a product excellence business that's all about innovation and technology," says Jonathan Neale, the managing director of McLaren Racing. "We're competing for first place in an environment where the difference between first and tenth is about 0.6 seconds, so we're constantly seeking fractions of a second in performance improvement. On average we'll make a change to the car every 20 minutes during the course of a season, and to do that, simulation is vital in making efficient changes to the car." Back in the factory, McLaren uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis running on Linux on SGI Altix high performance computers to simulate and predict the car's behaviour.

Motor racing wasn't always like this. Once upon a time those daring young men diced with death and each other in their flying machines, with little more than grease blown overalls, a loose flying-helmet, oil-splattered goggles and a V8 engine between them and the oncoming road. The skill of the driver was everything.

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Marcus Ericsson took his maiden British Formula 3 pole position in first qualifying at Croft today.

The Swedish rookie, who has a share in the championship lead after the opening rounds at Oulton Park last month, pulled out a 1:12.7 second lap towards the end of the half hour session to snatch pole from Esteban Guerrieri, who held the top spot for much of the session.

Sergio Perez proved that the Mugen-Honda engine is just as strong as the Mercedes by putting it on the front row, ahead of Ericsson's Fortec Motorsport team-mate Sebastian Hohenthal who was third.

Michael Devaney and Guerrieri ended up fourth and fifth for Ultimate Motorsport, in the best showing so far for the new Mygale chassis.

Carlin Motorsport lost the dominance they enjoyed at Oulton, but are still in touch with their four drivers qualifying sixth, seventh, ninth, and 10th, sandwiching Ricardo Teixeira in the third Ultimate car.

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