Formula One ( F1 )

I didn't say they'd signed anything, but from what i'd heard the teams were in agreement about the idea of a budget cap, but not the figure.

Anyways, Ferrari, Red Bull, Torro Rosso, Williams & Force India will all be racing next year, along with the 3 new teams USF1, Manor GP and Campos GP, all 3 of those using Cossie engines, McLaren, Toyota, BMW, Renault and Brawn have all been asked to rethink their conditional submissions in order to get onto the grid next season, or else more of the new teams that are lined up for entry will get their place.

This is the first I've heard about Cosworth's return to F1 (I'm not the most avid follower). This is great news, I used to work at Cosworth Racing in Northampton from 99-02 as the forklift driver and storeman when it was under the control of Ford USA. This was the time when we were building 9 engines per team per race for F1 and we had the works Jaguar team (great engine, poor car), Arrows as a customer team using the previous year's engine (until TWR got up to some naughties I believe) and Minardi (R.I.P). This is not to mention the works WRC Focus for McRae and Sainz, and the championship winning turbocharged V8 for Champcar in the US.

Happy times indeed, used to be cool seeing Eddie Irvine or Nikki Lauder wandering past the window, or seeing one of the WRC engineers hooning a fully road legal tarmac spec focus up the street. Sadly Ford USA might aswell have been handing out cash on the street rather than selling cars and they cut us out. This coincided with the F1 regulation changes to 1 engine per race, by far the most profitable section of the company, which made the company look pretty poor value to potential buyers. I don't even remember who bought the company (I was fired shortly before it all went off), but motorsport was not the priority and around 80% of the workforce was laid off, leaving only 1 of 3 shifts in the machine shop and a skeleton design team intact.

Anyways, hopefully a lot of incredibly skilled people will be able to return to Cosworth and it can continue its proud heritage in motorsport rather than putting its name to dodgy bodykitted Range Rovers.