Jag to vanish from F1.

[chris]

The Jaguar name in F1 will disappear soon. The team will remain, but it is to be rebranded as Ford. Apparently the men in Dearborn want to get more bang for their marketing dollar, and the Jag powered by Cosworth connection apparently is not enough.

It's sad to see the Jag name disappear from F1, but as long as they keep working the way they are now and don't try any radical restructuring, the team will go on to greatness, provided they are given a bit more funding.

Ford also apparently plans to withdraw from the World Rally Championship.

Importantly, this news provides us with an easy and fair way to compare Ford and Ferrari on a level playing field. ;) No more Ford GT versus 360 farcical comparisons. :D

Instead it will be Ferrari F2005 -v- Ford R6 (or whatever it will be called). :)

[Y2kGoofball]

Ford pull from WRC but end up in F1 :confused:

I can understand their angle with replacing JAG with Ford, the connection between the standard on road car to F1 car is there, even if it is just the blue oval badge

As for WRC I cant work out why, thats a major part of their marketing for the Focus, look at their Australian ad ... its a silver Focus replicating the WRC to the song "we can be heros" with the cheering yobbos, mud and everything

Still I spose if they want to do it thats their choice not mine

[chris]

The Focus really isn't doing so well in WRC at the moment, sadly. The French partner companies are carving up WRC for themselves and leaving nothing but scraps for the rest to fight over.

Surprisingly for sister companies, Peugeot and Citroën are bitter enemies in the WRC.

And the with the new Focus arriving soon, the WRC link will be a thing of the past. Still the old Focus was a worthy thing, and the Focus RS was indeed remembered as quite a fine drive. Sure it had a bit of turbo lag, but it was fast point-to-point, and with awesome brakes.

François Delecour had a reasonable amount of input into the Focus RS road-car. He wanted it to be like a Peugeot 205 GTi, but not as quite dangerous. He worked very well with the engineers, and the car ended up with that sort of feel.

But that's all a thing of the past, and now Ford wants some more marketing prestige from F1, and a more direct link to their corporation. They'll do well, provided Bill Ford is a slightly more forthcoming with proper funding, rather than having the team run on shoestring budget. A bit of thrift is always a good idea, but only to a certain point.

[Y2kGoofball]

Ford wasnt doing so well in the V8 championship from 1998ish onward when they were racing the poorly dersigned AU but they didnt pull out of that championship and now look at where they are :eek:

Oh and I spose too F1 gives a sense of more sophistication, well it does to me, which is what their marketing would also be looking at. In V8's its reliability, WRC is the same, although all racing uses precice measurements etc to gain even .001 of a second off a lap time, but to me its F1 that really stands out for that sort of sophisticated stuff.

[chris]

The thing about F1 is that the lap-times, often in qualifying are quite close, with the exception of probably Minardi. For a lot of the field, the lap times can be within a 1 second margin of difference (from slowest to fastest of the group). That is why in F1 we've seen passing to be difficult on some occasions, when two near equal cars have been battling for position.

It usually ended up with one driver making a mistake and then the pass happened. With many of the cars being near equal on performance, it goes down to driver ability. Some of the drivers have pulled off some great passes this year, while some other attempts have been very forgettable (Sato at the Nurburgring, and Montoya at Spa for instance).

[Bage]

Don't tell Tammy about this ;)
/bage

[Mickcals]

Hmmm that interesting.

But Ford is already represented in the F1, they power the Minardi F1 cars, so does that mean that they are going to pull out of Minardi and focus all their attention on this Ford team.

Well it would different watching the F1's and not have a green car flash by, it would be sad in a way as Jaguar was very proud of that F1 team

[chris]

No. Minardi has a contract with Ford for next year to use the same engines as used by the works team. Minardi will have the top spec Cosworth engines, rather than an older one. :)

[Mickcals]

alright, cool, just wondering.

[MATT]

Ford out of WRC sucks. They've done quite well this year and were really kicking butt early this season. They had the lead in both championships for a while, but that fell apart. The car is still quick, but with the Peugeot finally coming around and actually making Gronholm feel good once again, it's tough. Marcus was so mad earlier when he had so many problems. I got a kick out of watching what would frustrate him next and how would he respond. He's quite an animated character.

And while Montoya may have made one not so great attempted pass at Spa, you must admit that his move on Schumacher (which was successfully completed, I might add) was absolutely spectacular. That kind of move right there is why I'm a huge fan of Juan's. Very few people have the skill or outright balls to pull something like that off. It keeps the otherwise typically stale F1 environment a bit more exciting, even if he does go over the top at times.

Where people may say "that was stupid" I say "at least he tried." I like the very human nature of such things. It proves that not all F1 drivers are sponsor-controlled robots ;) Besides, you must admit, if a driver does attempt an absolutely insane move--AND he pulls it off (a big risk in itself) you would come out and say it's brilliant. It's easy being an armchair critic, isn't it? Guys like Sato and Montoya take risks to try and improve their position in the race. It's an intense desire to win and simply do better that drives these sort of things. And it's exactly the same idea behind just about anything in life. Sometimes you need to take risks to get ahead. There is always the possibility of a catastrophic failure, but at the very least you tried. It's better than going through life without every taking any risks, that's for sure. And that's why I like those guys for the risks they take. It may not work, and it may work... don't know until you try it. And then possibly learn a better way of going about it because of a failure.

Montoya's little accident was again pretty tough to call. He tried the same move he did on Michael earlier, but he didn't quite have it. He went all the way over the curbs to avoid collision but at the same time still try and challenge for the position. And the Renault driver (Who was it? Trulli?) couldn't see him from that position and just took the normal line and a little wheel interlocking occured, spinning the Renault around. Until you've been in that position yourself I'd say it should be hard to criticize any such move. I applaud his bravado and look forward to seeing him attempting more risky moves. At some point he will figure out when it's time to back out of it because there's no way it's going to happen. Same with all drivers. M. Schumacher has made many boneheaded moves before as well (and some collisions were intentional, which is infinitely worse than any on-track manuever Montoya has done).

Things move so fast in F1 that it's difficult to even react to something like that, though. Knowing Juan, once he starts a pass and sees any chance of completing it, he's not giving up... knowing when to back out and actually doing it without harm isn't very easy when you consider how incredibly fast everything is in the sport.

[VQ]

I personally hate the Focus ads, they say it's the top selling car and top rated car in EUROPE, which means jack all in Aus, it's stupid, the Astra is a far better looking and selling car.

Anyway, Ford going to F1 doesn't seem that big to me, so the car's gonna be Blue instead of Green, who cares, their still not the best they can be.

[Smokey!]

Wait a minute...wasn´t it the Steward-Ford team which was renamed into Jaguar/BAR and now it will become Ford again, but without Steward? &(

[MATT]

Wait a minute...wasn´t it the Steward-Ford team which was renamed into Jaguar/BAR and now it will become Ford again, but without Steward? &(

Subtract the BAR part :) Stewart-Ford F1 team started racing in 1997. Ford bought them out in 1999 and renamed it Jaguar for 2000.

BAT bought out the Tyrrell-Ford team and named it BAR in 1998... er.. for the 1999 season. The team remained under the Tyrrell banner for the remainder of the 1998 season.

EDIT: fixed my Tyrrell typo... keep on forgetting it's a double 'R'