Latest F1 news in brief

Antonio Felix da Costa did not have a big enough check to buy his ride in F1 so he will race in DTM and get paid to drive as the open wheel cancer continues unabated

Schu at home for 'emotional stimulation'
F1 teams seeking 'clarification' on radio clampdown
Alonso and Raikkonen are staying – Marchionne
Bianchi future unclear amid Marussia uncertainty
Red Bull's da Costa admits F1 'dream' over
At Sputtering Ferrari, Shake-Up at the Top Could Change Tradition
Prodromou starts work at McLaren
Hulkenberg: Force India desperate for fifth
I'm still in the title hunt, says Hamilton

Schu at home for 'emotional stimulation'
(GMM) Michael Schumacher is being treated at home by a medical team numbering about 15, the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reports.

After eight months of coma and hospitalization following his skiing fall last December, the F1 legend returned home to his estate on the shore of Lake Geneva last week.

But Bild am Sonntag claims Schumacher is now being tended to by a team whose size and expertise is comparable to the medical specialists who cared for him until recently at the rehabilitation clinic in Lausanne.

A spokesman for the clinic confirmed: "A large part of the team that cares for Michael now was trained by our specialists.

"We are following his treatment and are still a point of contact and entirely at his disposal."

Former Ferrari and Mercedes driver Schumacher's manager Sabine Kehm said last week that the 45-year-old German was not moving home because his medical condition had significantly changed.

Manfred Spitzer, medical director at a specialist brain hospital in Germany, told Bild: "I do not know the condition of Michael Schumacher, but if it is stable, then the familiar surroundings (of his home) can certainly help for now.

"Such emotional stimulation is very important for patients who have suffered a severe brain trauma," he added.

F1 teams seeking 'clarification' on radio clampdown
(GMM) Ferrari has given a cool welcome to the FIA's clampdown on radio instructions to F1 drivers.

The ban will fall on teams with immediate effect, and Red Bull's Christian Horner declared last week: "It is time for the drivers to drive."

Mercedes' Toto Wolff, however, is more concerned, fearing "essential on-track procedures will be affected" by the "complex and controversial" rule change.

Ferrari also thinks the clampdown will fundamentally affect the work of formula one teams and drivers under the increasingly complex new rules for 2014.

"Currently, drivers make two or three adjustments per lap based on information given to them by the engineers who monitor the situation via telemetry," the Italian team said in an online report entitled 'Radio gu-gu, Radio ga-ga'.

Ferrari announced that it is "evaluating the effect of this technical directive relating to radio communications and … the possible scenarios that could occur on track".

"There are still some uncertainties remaining especially regarding safety matters. Information about brake and tire wear are among those currently banned but messages on these topics could prevent dangerous incidents," it added.

Ferrari said it has sought "further clarification from the FIA" on the issue.

Alonso and Raikkonen are staying – Marchionne
(GMM) Ferrari's management revolution will have no impact on the driver lineup, new president Sergio Marchionne insists.

With Stefano Domenicali, Luca Marmorini and now long-time president Luca di Montezemolo all falling victim to the fabled team's poor performance in 2014, it has been suggested the turmoil at Ferrari might also affect the drivers.

Fernando Alonso has been linked with a big-money move to McLaren-Honda, and the period of upheaval – coinciding with the shock death of his sponsor Santander – may now be the final straw for the increasingly impatient Spaniard.

"(Marco) Mattiacci has to find a way to convince Fernando Alonso to stay," said former F1 driver turned BBC pundit Allan McNish.

"Just imagine how they would look if he (Alonso) cannot be convinced that Ferrari will sort themselves out," he added.

But Marchionne, who doubles as the chief of the Ferrari parent Fiat-Chrysler, insisted that is not going to happen.

"They (Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen) will continue with us," he is quoted by Spain's El Mundo Deportivo, "because they are two very strong drivers at the heart of our project — two world champions.

"We just have to give them a car to match their talent and they will be at the top again, no doubt," Marchionne added.

According to Speed Week, he has pledged to "give to Ferrari whatever is needed" in the financial stakes, which may help to convince Alonso to resist the Honda lure and stay on board.

Indeed, Raikkonen's manager Steve Robertson confirmed that despite the shakeups at Ferrari, the Finn is committed to the Maranello based team.

"Kimi's contract is with the Ferrari racing team, not di Montezemolo," he told the Finnish newspaper Turun Sanomat.

Bianchi future unclear amid Marussia uncertainty
(GMM) Jules Bianchi has revealed he is not sure he will still be driving for Marussia beyond 2014.

The 25-year-old Frenchman, who is the cream of Ferrari's driver development 'academy', has impressed since debuting last year with the backmarker team.

But regarding 2015, Bianchi's future is unclear.

"I have no idea where I will be next year," he told the Russian edition of Autosport on a visit to the Formula Renault 3.5 series in Hungary.

"I would like to have clarity, but at the moment I don't know anything for sure," Bianchi added.

"We are trying to find the best option for next year, but right now I just want to focus on the remaining races of the season."

The uncertainty could be because of the management turmoil at Ferrari, which might affect Fernando Alonso's commitment to the fabled marque amid the big-money interest of McLaren-Honda.

And Alonso's current teammate Kimi Raikkonen has struggled notably in 2014.

"Raikkonen has already said this year that he will probably retire from F1 when his current contract expires," former F1 driver turned BBC pundit Allan McNish said.

"So you have to ask how committed he is to next year if he is already coming out with remarks like that.

"If I was running Ferrari, I would want more results out of Raikkonen before the end of the year or I would be looking at the options," McNish added.

Also uncertain is the Ferrari 'power unit' customer Marussia's future, amid reports the team is struggling financially.

"It is obvious that we are very satisfied with Jules' work," team boss John Booth told Russia's Championat, "and of course we want to keep him in 2015.

"But if Ferrari needs him, it is very clear that he belongs to them.

"We love working with the Ferrari family and the relationship is very good," he said.

"We are talking with the drivers, but we will only do an announcement of the lineup, if possible, in December," he revealed.

Booth said American test driver Alexander Rossi, who almost made his debut for Marussia recently amid the recent Max Chilton contract kerfuffle, is a possibility for the future.

But arguably more crucial for Marussia is the basic direction of the F1 team. Earlier this year, it emerged that the British-based team had split with its Russian supercar-making owner.

The team is now owned by a company called Marussia Communications Limited.

"We are proud to represent in F1 Marussia and Mr. (Andrei) Cheglakov," said Booth.

"I know that right now the supercar project is not implemented, but I hope that in the future it will be."

But Booth hinted that he is not exactly sure what the future looks like for Marussia.

"I cannot talk about it," he said when asked about investors' guarantees for the 2015 season and beyond. "These are confidential questions for internal discussion only."

Red Bull's da Costa admits F1 'dream' over
(GMM) Antonio Felix da Costa has admitted his F1 "dream" is probably over.

Last year, the young Portuguese was the cream of Red Bull's driver development program and apparently destined for a Toro Rosso debut in 2014.

But just as da Costa's Formula Renault 3.5 campaign faltered, Red Bull decided instead to pluck teen Daniil Kvyat straight out of GP3.

Perhaps bolstered by the success of its daring choice, the energy drink company has now controversially decided to put 16-year-old Max Verstappen into F1 next year straight from F3 and karts.

In the meantime, Antonio Felix da Costa is acknowledging that his F1 dream may be over.

"At the start of the season I had hoped still to go into formula one," he told Speed Week.

"But although I am only 23 and it's a bit young to give up a dream, I had to decide what to focus on, and that is DTM," da Costa said.

Still with Red Bull backing, he has raced a BMW in the premier German touring car series this year, scoring only 4 points so far.

But he insists that seeing first Kvyat and now Verstappen race ahead of him into F1 is "not hard" to cope with.

"I enjoy DTM very much and from the beginning it has gone well," da Costa said, "so I have decided to concentrate on this.

"If I was to spend ten years here, I would be happy," he insisted. "This is my goal.

"Max is a very, very good racing driver, and I could not have achieved at 16 what he has achieved. He is clearly a special talent," said da Costa.

"At the same time I am very sorry for Carlos Sainz Jr," he added. "He was developed by Red Bull, they invested a lot in him, and he is now ready for promotion to the premier class.

"I hope he gets the chance and that we will see Max and Carlos on the grid next year."

In the meantime, da Costa is focusing not only on DTM, but also the all-new Formula E series, even though a clash last weekend meant he had to sit out the season opener.

At Sputtering Ferrari, Shake-Up at the Top Could Change Tradition
At the Ferrari headquarters in Maranello, Italy, a few miles outside Modena, there is much to remind a visitor of the guiding principle set down by the company's founder, Enzo Ferrari, in the years after World War II. Ferrari decreed that the main business of his company would be racing, primarily in Formula One, and that success on the track would trump all else, including building and selling the production cars that have become icons of style and performance over the past 60 years.

But the question now is whether that tradition — selling road cars to support the racing operations, rather than using the racetrack as a shop window to promote road car sales — will survive at Ferrari under the new, more hard-edge corporate era that seemed to be heralded this week after an inelegant management shakeup that seemed to challenge the ethos set by the company's founder.

Statements by the new Ferrari chairman, Sergio Marchionne, who is adding the Ferrari duties to his role as chief executive of Fiat Chrysler, have suggested that Ferrari will most likely be shorn of some of the go-it-alone idiosyncrasies that have survived since the cantankerous founder died at age 90 in 1988.The takeover by the Italian-born, Canadian-educated Marchionne, 62, also will mark the moment when Ferrari's fortunes pass, for the first time, into the hands of somebody who is not a pedigreed veteran of the company's Formula One operations.

That pedigree has been inescapable in the 23 years di Montezemolo has been in charge. Visitors to his office at Maranello have passed down a corridor hung with photographs of Ferrari's racing triumphs, some of them achieved when di Montezemolo was the Formula One team manager in the 1970s. As chairman, di Montezemolo demonstrated his commercial prowess by guiding the company to its most profitable years as a road car manufacturer, with sales (6,922 cars, a third of them in the United States, in 2013) and profits ($318 million) now at multiples of what they were when Enzo Ferrari died.

But the commercial success has coincided with more patchy results in the company's racing operation. In the Michael Schumacher years, a multinational team of engineers, designers and racing team principals assembled by di Montezemolo delivered five consecutive drivers' championships from 2000 and 2004, a record not even Ferrari himself could match. Overall, 118 of Ferrari's 221 Grand Prix wins have been achieved under di Montezemolo's chairmanship.

But the glory years have been followed with one of the worst chapters in Ferrari's racing history. The team has not won a driver's championship since Kimi Raikkonen's sliver-thin triumph in 2007, or a manufacturer's championship since 2008. Ferrari had only two wins in the 19 races in 2013, and none in the 13 run so far this year.

The urbane di Montezemolo has tried in vain to turn the team around. Last year he threatened to fire the Spanish driver Fernando Alonso after Alonso publicly belittled the cars Ferrari had prepared for him, and this season he brought back Raikkonen and replaced the longtime team manager, Stefano Domenicali, and the head of its engine department, Luca Marmorini, after Ferrari's hybrid V-6 turbo engines were woefully outclassed by those produced by Mercedes-Benz, which has won 10 of this year's 13 races.

But none of the moves were enough to save di Montezemolo in the face of continuing failure on the track. After Ferrari failed again at last weekend's Italian Grand Prix, with Alonso retiring in a plume of engine smoke and Raikkonen's car finishing ninth, Marchionne told reporters that it was "absolutely nonnegotiable" that Ferrari should win Formula One races and that the team's track successes were essential to the marketing plans of the Fiat Chrysler group.

On Wednesday, the guillotine dropped. Di Montezemolo, describing the decision as "the end of an era," accepted a $35 million severance package and said in a statement that he considered it appropriate that Marchionne should take the lead at Ferrari at a time when Fiat Chrysler was preparing to go public with its listing in New York.

What all this portends for Ferrari and its racing operations is unclear. Di Montezemolo had said that he favored capping Ferrari production at 7,000 cars a year, to protect the brand's exclusivity. That approach that has led to a two-year waiting list for Ferrari's models in the United States. Marchionne has spoken of increasing output to 10,000 cars a year. That basic shift in ethos could eventually affect the Formula One team.

According to Corriere della Sera, Italy's most influential newspaper, di Montezemolo has voiced fears that Ferrari's future would be sacrificed to the demands of mass manufacturing, American style. "Ferrari is now American," the paper reported him as having told friends. Others who know him have said that he fears that Ferrari, once fully integrated with Fiat Chrysler, will find the wings of its racing team clipped, with corporate concerns about profit coming before the freewheeling pursuit of engineering innovation.

Marchionne has responded by saying he wants Ferrari to succeed on the track, and he has cited the company's failures in Formula One as the primary reason for di Montezemolo's dismissal. But whatever personnel changes lie in store for the team, it seems clear that Ferrari will henceforth have to conform to Fiat Chrysler's corporate playbook, and that the accounting department's blue pencil may hover over the Formula One team, which outspends all its competitors with an 800-man work force — nearly a third of the Ferrari payroll — and a budget that is said to run to nearly $500 million annually, close to two years of Ferrari profits.

In an interview last month with the British magazine Autosport, the new team manager, Marco Mattiacci, who, like Marchionne, has a commercial background and no previous experience in Formula One, said that his vision for Ferrari was that success on the track would come only if it broke abruptly with its past. He gave few particulars, but he sounded an ominous hint that those who pined for the old ways would not last.

"We need a cultural change," he said. "To go back to the top, we need discontinuity." NY Times

Prodromou starts work at McLaren
Peter Prodromou has officially started work at McLaren, taking on the role of Chief Engineer.

Prodromou signed a deal with the Woking-based outfit at the end of 2013, although he was not expected to complete the switch until January 2015 due to being contractually tied to reigning World Champions Red Bull.

But an agreement between the two squads regarding aerodynamicist Dan Fallows has seen Prodromou, who previously worked for McLaren between the 1991 and 2006 campaigns, make an earlier than planned arrival.

"It's fantastic to return to McLaren, and to see a mixture of faces old and new," explained Prodromou.

"Of course, I have first-hand experience of just what a passionate, focused and capable race team exists within these walls, and I've already seen the enthusiasm and positivity that exists to return McLaren to World Championship-winning glory.

"I, too, am determined to work flat-out to do everything I can to help initiate a new chapter of success in McLaren's history."

"On behalf of everyone at McLaren, I'd like to welcome Peter to the team," added Racing Director Eric Boullier.

"He joins us at an auspicious time; we've spent much of 2014 working to develop and organize our design department, and his arrival neatly coincides with the conclusion of that restructuring.

"Peter has proved beyond doubt that he's one of the most capable and intelligent engineers in Formula 1, and everyone at McLaren is looking forward to the contribution he'll make as we push ahead with our ambitious plans for the future."

Hulkenberg: Force India desperate for fifth
Nico Hulkenberg says Force India is "desperate" to finish in the top five of the Constructors' Championship as they bid to beat rivals McLaren to the spot.

The Silverstone-based team currently sits sixth in the standings, but has just a one-point deficit to McLaren following last weekend's Italian Grand Prix.

While admitting that the top four teams are now out of reach, Hulkenberg nonetheless feels Force India can snatch fifth from its fellow Mercedes-powered outfit.

"There's no chance of getting back ahead of [Williams and Ferrari]," Hulkenberg told GPUpdate.net.

"McLaren is our main opponent now and the race is between us and them. Obviously we're desperate to finish fifth in the Constructors', that's important to us and [is] our target.

"Our aim should be to replicate the first half [of the season]. We've been consistently in the points."

The German driver also says he is not worried about the prospect of spending another season with a midfield team, should he and Force India opt to continue their partnership into 2015.

"I'm not massively worried, the situation is what it is," he said. "You're always trying to do as good as you can with the package you've got – everyone in the paddock knows that's how it works.

"Then hopefully one day the opportunity will come that you have a winning car, or that with this team we can have a winning car."

I'm still in the title hunt, says Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton is adamant that he remains in the hunt for this year's World Championship as he bids to close down the 22-point advantage currently enjoyed by Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg.

Hamilton claimed victory in Italy but Rosberg finished in second position to ensure that the gap between the two was reduced by just seven points, with six rounds of the year remaining.

Hamilton nonetheless maintains that he still has a genuine shot at glory, as the Formula 1 season enters its final stages, starting in Singapore next weekend.

"With Nico coming second [at Monza] I haven't been able to close the gap too much – but there's still plenty of points to be won and I'm glad to have taken a step forwards," he said.

"Despite the highs and lows, I'm still well and truly in the hunt for the championship and that is something that gives me huge motivation for the final six races – starting in Singapore."

Hamilton won under the lights at Marina Bay in 2009 but retired from the race in 2010 and 2012, while he placed only fifth in 2011 and 2013. The Brit is hopeful that his fortune will change for this season's event.

"It's a street circuit and I love street circuits," he said.

"I won there in 2009 which was a really special experience, plus I had a podium – which should really have been a win – at the first race in 2008. My luck hasn't been great at this circuit since then but hopefully that will change next weekend."