F1: New cars for Aussie F1 drivers tonight

Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso to unveil the cars Australia's two F1 drivers will race this year, more WRC woe, and hybrid Audis for Le Mans

MOTORSPORT REPORT

Webber and Ricciardo get first crack in testing
Many of the new Formula One cars have been unveiled and those for Australian drivers Mark Webber and Daniel Ricciardo (pictured) will be launched tonight.

F1 testing begins tomorrow at Jerez in Spain, and Webber will do the first two days for Red Bull Racing before his dual world champion teammate Sebastian Vettel takes over the Renault-engined RB8.

Ricciardo will do the first two days in the Ferrari-engined Toro Rosso car and then his French rookie teammate Jean-Eric Vergne the following two days.

While excitement builds about the new F1 season, there has been more turmoil in the World Rally Championship, while Audi has announced it will run two hybrid cars at Le Mans in June as well as two of its all-conquering diesels.

And V8 Supercars is just days away from its season launch at Melbourne's Sandown circuit. More on that later in the week.

All eyes on legality of new machinery
F1 pre-season testing has been cut from 15 days last year to 12 days before this year's world championship starts in Melbourne on March 16-18. he other two four-day tests will be in Barcelona.

There is speculation in F1 that some teams have pushed the limits -- and perhaps beyond -- in their interpretation of this year's regulations, particularly in the wake of the ban on blown rear diffusers. McLaren carefully hid the exhausts and diffuser on its MP4-27 at its launch -- the first of the new-generation cars.

Federation Internationale de l'Autmobile (FIA) F1 technical delegate Charlie Whiting is expected to be at Jerez this week paying close attention to all the new cars.

Particularly noticeable on the new Ferrari and Lotus (nee Renault) is a "step" nose. Regulations aimed at improving safety decree that the point of the nose of an F1 car be lower this year. The lower rear of the Ferrari is narrower and more tapered than on last year's model, which won only one race.

Fernando Alonso, twice world champion with Renault and now entering his third season with Ferrari, has predicted the F2012 will be "winning from the very beginning".

Mercedes won't have its new car ready until Barcelona and will use the Jerez test purely to assess the latest Pirelli tyres.

Spanish team HRT won't have its new car either and only Pedro de la Rosa will drive for the budget-strapped outfit at Jerez -- and only for two days. HRT completed F1's driver line-up at the weekend by announcing it had recalled Indian driver Narain Karthikeyan, who made way in the middle of last season for Ricciardo. Karthikeyan is 35 and de la Rosa almost 41, so they form one of the oldest driver combinations in F1 for years.

Karthikeyan denied it was sponsorship alone that had got him a seat again this year. "There are drivers with more resources and it would be wrong to say that I secured the drive just because of sponsorship," he said.

And Karthikeyan, who HRT recalled for the first Indian Grand Prix late last season, benching Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi for that race after initially planning to "rest" Ricciardo, had a dig at the young West Australian in talking up his credentials to be on the F1 grid.

"Ricciardo was the blue-eyed boy and I beat him [in India] despite being low on practice," he said.

Raikkonen vows he's fully motivated for return
Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 world champion for Ferrari now returning to F1 with Lotus after two years in the World Rally Championship and a dabble at American stock car racing, has hit out at criticism of what has always been seen as a lack of motivation.

"There's always talk about my motivation, written by people who don't know me and couldn't have an idea on how strong my motivation is," Raikkonen said. "If I didn't feel I had the motivation, I would stop. My feeling is that I probably drove some of my best races in my last season in F1 and I was very happy with my performance... I've never had any issues with motivation."

Asked when he decided to give up rallying to return to F1, Raikkonen said: "When I did the (low-tier) NASCAR races. I enjoyed the racing and I want to do more racing... I still want to do rally and if I could I'd do them both at the same time -- but this isn't possible. For sure I will do rallying again in the future.

"I want to do racing as I had a really good time in NASCAR racing against other people and I realised that I was missing this -- that's when I decided that if there was a good chance to return properly that I would do it."

And asked how long it would have taken him to become as good in rallying as eight-time world champion Sebastien Loeb, he said: "I don't know! I don't think anyone is as good as him right now!

"For sure I could have improved, but I don't know how far. I'd improved last year from where I was in 2010... I went to rallying to see how well I could do and I still think that it's one of the most difficult sports that I have ever tried. It's not easy!

"The guys at the front are very fast, but equally if you put them in an F1 car they would probably have a similar story to me in rallying... I think I would need another couple of years with testing. With rallying there are so many different surfaces and it's completely different from F1."

Serious new setbacks for WRC
The World Rally Championship's woes have worsened, with the FIA announcing a breakdown in its negotiations with Eurosport to become the new promoter and telecaster.

International TV coverage of this week's Rally of Sweden is under a cloud and organisers of other rounds of the championship have been told to make their own TV arrangements for this year.

Australia, luckily perhaps, isn't on the WRC calendar this year. Instead it is New Zealand's turn to stage the South Pacific round.

Ford's director of European motorsport Gerard Quinn has told Autosport that relying on individual TV deals for each event is "totally impractical".

Quinn said that will not satisfy manufacturers, participants, organisers or fans "or anybody in the sport".

"This is a global sport which needs a global promoter," he said. Autosport also quoted an "insider" from one of the WRC teams saying: "This sends us back to the dark ages."

The problems stem from the collapse of previous promoter and telecaster North One Television's parent company Convers Sports Initiatives (CSI). Russian Vladimir Antonov who controlled CSI was arrested on fraud charges last November.

Eurosport has been associated with the FIA on the Intercontinental Rally Challenge and World Touring Car Championship and broadcast last month's opening WRC round, the Monte Carlo Rally.

It appeared the logical replacement for North One but the FIA said on Friday it had withdrawn from negotiations with Eurosport and would start talking to other interested parties. "A series of issues proved impossible to reconcile," it said of the negotiations with Eurosport.

WRC Commission chairman Jarmo Mahonen then told organisers of WRC rounds they would have to make their own TV deals. Amid all that turmoil there was no advance on the rift between the BMW Group and Prodrive, which runs the MINI program in the WRC. The parties have been in dispute over the financing of that program and the BMW Group board is reported to have decided to sever the connection.

While an expected announcement on the seemingly irreconcilable breakdown did not come on Friday night, Autosport has reported that a meeting of Prodrive staff has been called for tonight, Australian time.

Four Audis and two Aussies on Le Mans entry list
Le Mans 24-Hour organisers have announced the entry list for this year's race that includes four entries -- two of them hybrids -- from Audi, the manufacturer that has won the classic 10 times in the past 11 years, and two Australian drivers, David Brabham and John Martin.

The June 16-17 event will be the 80th running of the world's premier endurance race. Apart from two of its diesel R18s, Audi has entered two diesel-electric cars that will be unveiled late this month.

Audi will field several cars in America's Sebring 12-Hour, the opening round of the new World Endurance Championship on March 17, but not the hybrids -- they will make their debut in the Spa Six-Hour in Belgium on May 5.

"To develop the hybrid technology for Le Mans is at least as ambitious and challenging as our diesel project was in its early stages," Audi's motorsport chief Dr Wolfgang Ullrich said.

"The first test results are very encouraging and we are intrigued to see just how this technology performs in combination with our ultra lightweight technology on the race track at Le Mans.

"We still see potential with the conventional drive -- just as our colleagues do in production development.

"This is why we are absolutely delighted that the ACO (Automobile Club de l'Ouest, the Le Mans organiser) and FIA selection committee has accepted our entries and that we can join the grid with four cars at the commemorative running of the Le Mans race."

While Audi's traditional rival Peugeot has recently quit sportscar racing during the European financial crisis, the Le Mans entry list contains the two Toyota TS 030 hybrids on which we have recently reported.

Entrants only need to nominate one driver at this stage, and David Brabham is listed in the Honda Performance Development ARX 03a entered by Britain's JRM team among the 15 entries in the LMP1 category.

Queenslander John Martin, who has raced overseas in various openwheeler categories for several years, is the nominated driver in an Oreca 03 Nissan for the ADR-Delta team -- headed by long-time expatriate Aussie Alan Docking -- in LMP2.

The entry list also contains the radical American DeltaWing car, to be run by Highcroft Racing with which Brabham was successfully associated for so long. Its nominated driver is Marino Franchitti, younger brother of IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti.

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