Latest F1 news in brief

Could be last F1 race for Kobayashi. He would need to bring a big check to keep team afloat

Kobayashi retains Caterham seat for home race
Mercedes 'can throw championship away' – Marko
Father plays down 'superstar' Verstappen's Suzuka debut
'Faster' cars would make F1 'harder' – Coulthard
Wolff '99pc sure' of 2015 Mercedes lineup
Ferrari 'determined' to overhaul Williams
Single DRS zone retained at Suzuka
Button says McLaren on 'upward curve'

Kobayashi retains Caterham seat for home race
(GMM) Kamui Kobayashi has retained his race seat at Caterham for his home grand prix this weekend.

As the team seeks new sources of income in the wake of founder Tony Fernandes' shock mid-season exit, the Japanese driver lost his place to Andre Lotterer at Spa in August.

It was expected that Roberto Merhi would then replace Kobayashi in Monza and beyond, but – despite his Friday outing at Monza – the 23-year-old Spanish rookie is yet to secure his mandatory super license.

Caterham announced on Wednesday that Merhi will return to Friday duties this weekend at Suzuka.

It is good news for Kobayashi, who therefore gets at least one more race outing for the Leafield based team in front of his adoring home fans in Japan.

Popular and highly rated yet substantially unsponsored, Kobayashi's future beyond the Japanese grand prix is much more clouded.

"He knows that he has open doors at Caterham," new team boss Manfredi Ravetto told F1's official website last week.

"Obviously he knows that he also has to deliver this year. He has to help us to achieve the P10 that we are targeting."

It is a quite different story for the heavily sponsored Marcus Ericsson, as the 24-year-old has enjoyed an uninterrupted 2014 season and solid prospects of retaining the seat next year.

"We don't want to lose Marcus," confirmed Ravetto, "because the team invested in him in his rookie time and now wants to harvest on this investment, as we think that he will be able to deliver."

Mercedes 'can throw championship away' – Marko
(GMM) With five full races to spare, Mercedes this weekend has its first opportunity to wrap up the 2014 constructors' world championship.

Utterly dominant this season, the German team is 174 points clear heading into Suzuka, meaning a one-two on Sunday with Red Bull scoring fewer than 3 points would wrap it up with Sochi, Austin, Brazil and Abu Dhabi still to run.

"Every single one of us wants to finish 2014 in style," confirmed team boss Toto Wolff.

Mercedes is also the overwhelming favorite for the drivers' title, but the close battle between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg and a marked record in the reliability stakes means that Daniel Ricciardo remains remotely in the running for now.

Red Bull's Dr Helmut Marko is keeping the pressure high, insisting that the tension between Hamilton and Rosberg still threatens to derail the silver team.

"This peace (between the drivers) is not real," he exclaimed to the major German daily Bild ahead of the Japanese grand prix.

"Eventually, Hamilton and Rosberg will be side by side again, and when they see it is the title in front of them, there are no more rules," added Marko.

"And when the silver arrows explode again, we will be there to beat them."

Marko also hopes Mercedes' poor reliability record of late, including former championship leader Nico Rosberg's steering wheel failure in Singapore, continues to worsen.

"Further losses for them plays in our favor in the championship fight," said the outspoken Austrian.

"Mercedes can still throw the championship away."

Father plays down 'superstar' Verstappen's Suzuka debut
(GMM) Jos Verstappen has moved to ease the pressure on his son's shoulders ahead of the Japanese grand prix weekend.

The former F1 driver is already in Japan, where his newly seventeen year old son will make history at Suzuka as the youngest ever driver to participate in an official grand prix program.

Young Verstappen's maiden appearance will only be in Friday morning practice, ahead of his full race debut next year with the same Toro Rosso team.

Still, the pressure is intense.

"The whole motor sport world will be looking at what Max is doing," said his father Jos, "but he must take it easy and not drive straight away on the limit."

42-year-old Verstappen, with over 100 grand prix starts to his name, knows well the challenge of the fabled Suzuka circuit.

Max revealed: "My dad has raced at Suzuka many times and he told me it's not an easy track to start on."

So Verstappen senior is trying to play down the obvious pressure and the high expectations, after Dr Helmut Marko recently compared Max with the legendary Ayrton Senna.

And F1 legend Sir Jackie Stewart has now said Max has the potential to be a "superstar".

Jos said: "No one should expect Max to turn the world upside down on Friday.

"Lap times are not important," he is quoted by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf.

"It's much more important for Max to just do his laps.

"Max will be driving a new car to him, which is very different to the 2012 version. And he's also starting at Suzuka, which is not an easy task."

'Faster' cars would make F1 'harder' – Coulthard
(GMM) The best way to make F1 cars harder to drive is to make them faster.

That is the view of retired grand prix veteran David Coulthard, following reports the sport's governing FIA is concerned the challenge of driving an F1 car today is 'too easy'.

That view has intensified recently as the age of F1 rookies, for instance the newly seventeen year old Max Verstappen who will drive on Friday at Suzuka, plummets dramatically.

"The FIA … is said to be examining ways of making F1 cars harder to drive," correspondent Kevin Eason wrote in The Times.

"As drivers have become younger and leaner, F1's leaders are worried that the sport is no longer the highest examination of driver talent, skill and strength," he added.

It is part of why the FIA has suddenly clamped down on so-called 'driver coaching' over the pit-to-car radios, to end the appearance that the cars are even being piloted by remote control by engineers and boffins.

But Coulthard, whose own F1 career began just as the great Ayrton Senna's so tragically ended, thinks the FIA is wide of the mark to think radios are to blame for the sport's problems.

"It (the clampdown) seems to be the answer to a question that no one was asking," he said in a column for the F1 sponsor UBS.

"I wasn't really aware of any grumbling," said the 43-year-old Scot, who today is a pundit for British television.

"In my opinion, if you want to make the cars harder to drive, make them faster. It is ironic that they are trying to find ways of making life more difficult for the drivers when the actual cars are slower than they were back in 2004," added Coulthard.

The former McLaren and Red Bull driver even thinks the radio clampdown is counterproductive, as it removes one of F1's "technological advancements" only to replace it with "another layer of bureaucracy and red tape".

"f someone offered you the chance to get rid of internet banking and go back to just making all your transactions the old-fashioned way, via a cashier, would you accept? Of course you wouldn't," said Coulthard.

"It would be a retrograde step; willfully ignoring technology that already exists and that everyone was perfectly happy with anyway.

"As for the drivers I spoke to in Singapore last weekend, some were for it, some were against it, some were not fussed either way. I think that just about sums this whole issue up. It's all a bit of a nothing," he added.

Wolff '99pc sure' of 2015 Mercedes lineup
(GMM) Team boss Toto Wolff is not 100 per cent sure Mercedes will head into the 2015 season with an unchanged driver lineup.

With Nico Rosberg already under contract into the longer term, his teammate Lewis Hamilton is among those drivers speculatively linked with a sensational switch to the new Honda era at McLaren beginning next year.

Recently, a slight disagreement between Briton Hamilton and Mercedes became apparent after Wolff indicated talks for a new contract beyond 2015 had been "frozen".

"Well, I haven't said that I was freezing anything," the 2008 world champion said last month.

It is rumored Hamilton might be tempted to leave Mercedes if his teammate Rosberg, with whom relations are already intensely strained, wins the 2014 title.

Wolff has also warned that if the pair cannot find a way to work together effectively, Mercedes might need to rethink its 2015 lineup.

It is a theme Austrian Wolff appears to have returned to in the days before the Japanese grand prix.

He told Germany's Sport Bild that the Brackley based team's driver lineup for 2015 is only "99 per cent" guaranteed at this stage.

"You have to hold something back because exceptional circumstances can always arise. In life, nothing is ever 100 per cent for sure," said Wolff.

He insisted yet again that contractual talks with Hamilton have indeed been frozen for the time being.

"On both sides we had the desire and decided to postpone the issue, because the championship is so intense," Wolff said.

"Rather than be discussing commercial issues, we want to get to the end of the season. And then the first thing we will do is sit down with Lewis and hopefully everything will be in the bag for the years after 2015," he added.

Ferrari 'determined' to overhaul Williams
Ferrari says it is "determined" to reclaim third in the Constructors' standings during the season run-in.

With five rounds remaining, the Maranello-based outfit is locked in a battle with the revitalized Williams, which jumped ahead at the Italian Grand Prix courtesy of Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas' sizeable points haul.

Although Ferrari scored more points on the streets of Singapore, Williams sits nine points clear ahead of this weekend's Japanese Grand Prix, a deficit Technical Director James Allison is desperate to see overturned.

"We left Singapore with some satisfaction that areas we'd been working on the car, to improve its mechanical grip for example, appear to be paying off," said Allison, who joined Ferrari from Lotus last year. "So we go to Suzuka and the remaining races determined to close the gap to Williams and then try and actually pull ahead of them."

Allison says he expects Suzuka to provide the ultimate test for Formula 1's new turbocharged machines.

"Suzuka is one of the all-time great circuits, with some of the most challenging corners. It's one of the biggest tests of the car in the whole year, as it doesn't just ask that it can go well in the fast "S" complex, but there are slow corners, long straights and all manner of ways to reveal the weakness of the car or the driver," he said.

"A team that comes back having done well knows that they are a good team with a strong package."

Single DRS zone retained at Suzuka
The FIA has retained a single DRS zone for this weekend's Japanese Grand Prix.

As in previous years at the Suzuka circuit, the activation area runs along the majority of the start/finish straight, following a detection point shortly before the final Turn 16/17 chicane, also known as the Casio Triangle.

Monaco is the only other round to have featured just one DRS zone this season, due to a lack of space.

Button says McLaren on 'upward curve'
Jenson Button believes that his McLaren team is on an "upward curve" with the development of the MP4-29 chassis, even though he admits the car is unlikely to flourish at this weekend's Japanese Grand Prix.

Button is looking for a return to the points after suffering a costly mechanical retirement at the Singapore Grand Prix, which paved the way for Force India to move back ahead in the Constructors' battle over fifth position.

"Despite not getting to the finish in Singapore, we're definitely on an upward curve in terms of developing the car," the 2009 World Champion. "Suzuka will be a tricky one for us, but I'm still really looking forward to it."

"It's one of the best circuits we come to; a real challenge and incredibly unforgiving, which makes it all the more rewarding when you get it right," Button, who claimed victory at Suzuka in 2011, added of the track. "The Esses are the best section of corners in the world – totally unique to Suzuka, which makes racing here so exciting.

"Being such a tricky, high-speed track you need good downforce, rhythm and focus to get the most out of it."

Six points separate Force India and McLaren heading to Suzuka, equivalent to a seventh-place finish.