The Renault team today launched a very cool YouTube channel. Worth checking out not only for the video, but for the sound and the interviews. In fact, you'll get to see some videos made during the team launch, which I wrote about in an image gallery a while ago....

There were some incomprehensible things happening with qualifying for the Turkish Grand Prix yesterday when Lewis Hamilton first said he'd made the wrong tire choice and then backtracked later in the day and said it was the right choice. It all became clear in today's race, won by Felipe Massa of Ferrari, when it was revealed that McLaren was involved in anything but a normal tire weekend.

The Bridgestone Tire company had advised McLaren that the tires on Hamilton's McLaren were at the limit of being safe enough to be used in a two pit-stop race. They advised the team to make three pit stops on safety grounds. Last year, a tire on Hamilton's car had blown out on this circuit, and Bridgestone said that it was dangerously close to the same situation this year. So it was that Hamilton made three pit stops, compared to the two pit stops of the Ferraris. He used the hard tires on the first three stints and the softer tire on the final stint. But it made for a great race, and a brilliant drive by the British driver, who finished second in the race despite the handicap.

With the departure of Super Aguri and the reduction to only 10 teams, qualifying had to be tweaked again. No big deal. The FIA has said that in the first and second qualifying sessions the last five cars will be eliminated, leaving as usual the top 10 cars for the final session. And so the F1 qualifying saga continues.

It doesn't really make that much difference, but now that Super Aguri is out, I'm looking forward to seeing which ones the last five cars will be in Turkey tomorrow. Anyone want to make a guess?

Heikki Kovalainen recovered fully from his horrendous accident in Spain and will race this weekend, after doctors from the International Automobile Federation and the chief medical officer of the Turkish Grand Prix gave him the go-ahead. Among the interesting things we learned in a press conference full of questions about safety and Kovalainen's accident was that despite the Finnish driver reassuring everyone by raising his hand with an OK sign shortly after he was extracted from the car, Kovalainen said he does not remember having raised his hand. As far as he was concerned, his first memory after regaining consciousness was when he was in intensive care in the hospital in the city!

"I was a bit confused at what happened," Kovalainen said, "so I asked my team doctor, Mr. Hintsa, 'What are we doing here?' And he explained what happened, and then after that, the memory has been normal and I was aware of everything after that. That's where I got back on track."

The Super Aguri team has failed in its effort to survive the season. Talks have fallen through with all of its potential backers and the Honda Motor Co., which has supported the team for the last two seasons. Formula One is one team poorer, down to 10 teams.

“In order to realize my dream to become an owner of a Formula One Team, I applied for a grid position in the FIA Formula One World Championship in November 2005," said Aguri Suzuki, the team principal. "Since then, I have participated in the championship for 2 years and 4 months as the SUPER AGURI F1 TEAM, but regretfully I must inform you that the team will be ceasing its racing activities as of today."

"With the help of Honda, we have somehow managed to keep the team going, but we find it difficult to establish a way to continue the activities in the future within the environment surrounding F1 and as a result, I have concluded to withdraw from the Championship," he added.

No sooner did the Super Aguri team announce that it had hopes a deal would come through to save the team than the word from Istanbul, where the next race takes place next weekend, is that the Super Aguri trucks and cars have been stopped at the gate of the circuit and not allowed in.

The story goes that Nick Fry, who runs the Honda team, has told Bernie Ecclestone, who runs the F1 show, that Super Aguri's deal - which depends on continued help from Honda - will not go through. Aguri Suzuki, the team owner, is to meet with Honda people on Tuesday to discuss the deal. The Honda team, meanwhile, is not necessarily keen on seeing the deal happen because without Super Aguri on the paddock, there would be more resources given over to the Honda team - or at least, lets say, fewer things to distract the team in its efforts to return to a winning power.

But since when does a team director from one team get to speak for another team? I'd like to see Ron Dennis, the director of McLaren, tell Bernie that Ferrari has decided it will not race in Istanbul. Would he lock the doors on Ferrari? Sounds like a promising weekend on the news front!

According to a Reuters report, McLaren Mercedes has released a statement saying that neither Ron Dennis, the McLaren owner and director, nor anyone else on the team was involved in setting up the Max Mosley sex scandal sting.

A Mosley ally in the Czech Republic recently said something that indicated the team might have been involved in setting up the scandal since the team had to pay a $100 million fine last year during the McLaren-Ferrari spy scandal.

The team statement came, said the report, "after Radovan Novak, the general secretary of the Czech Automobile Association and a long-standing ally of Mosley, appeared to suggest in a Prague radio interview that the revelations might be linked to last year's Formula One spying controversy."

McLaren is asking the Czech for an explanation.

It is a generally well-known fact within the Formula 1 paddock that the 11 teams that make up the sport can never agree on anything between them - except that they want to go racing. At the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona this weekend, the team bosses met to talk about next year's rules and then inevitably spoke about Max Mosley and whether or not they thought he should leave his job. What I find interesting about the Reuters report on this Mosley matter is not so much the lack of a complete agreement on the matter, but the reason that the teams apparently cannot agree - which appears, yes, to have something to do with going racing.

Organizers of the Spanish Grand Prix boast the installation of the biggest screen at any F1 circuit so that the spectators get a view almost as good as television watchers....;-)

I'm in the paddock at the moment but have not seen the screen. I understand it is visible to 22,000 spectators and it is 2152 square feet in surface area. That sounds big indeed. It uses the 16:9 format and the sides of the screen are used for showing the results and the telemetric data and other race information. It is located in the Stadium zone, between the La Caixa corner and the Banc Sabadell corner. It can be seen from the grand stands B,G, C and H.

If you do not have the good fortune to be here in sunny Barcelona, however, then turn on your television and computer. At Formula1.com you get the timing screens.

As announced a couple of months ago, the International Automobile Federation launched an anti-racism campaign today to time it along with this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix. It was here at the track outside Barcelona where the race takes place this weekend that some fans attended a test session a few months ago and called out racist slurs against Lewis Hamilton, the former teammate of Fernando Alonso, the Spanish world champion.

Of course, since then Max Mosley, the president of the FIA has been involved in his own scandal, which had to do with being exposed by a British newspaper playing sex games with five prostitutes. It was alleged that the games involved Nazi role-playing. Mosley did not show up in Spain to launch the campaign, but he did make a comment about it.

"One thing that most attracted me to motor sport was that nobody cared about your background, race, gender or religion," Mosley said. "All that mattered was how quick you were."

Go check out the web site devoted to "Everyrace" campaign. Brace yourselves for the melding photo display of some of the faces of people who work in Formula 1....