Quotes of the week

“F1 must have rules that apply equally to everybody. It’s not fair that certain diffusers are made one way and others in another way, because I don’t think it’s right that every team has its own rule book. It seems that there are two sets of regulations: those which allow certain teams to have a diffuser made in a certain way that is forbidden to others because they consider it illegal. That’s not what we expect. We want black and white rules that are the same for everybody. I wouldn’t want it to end up like it did with the engine freeze, where we respected it and found ourselves 50 horsepower down on the others. This is the same story." Flavio Briatore, Managing Director, Renault, complaining that rival teams are flouting the spirit of F1’s rules with controversial diffuser designs, and warned that his team may lodge an official protest at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

"We haven't got a spare date. We're in trouble. We need a date. We're going to be in trouble if we do have Donington. We left there because I'm trying to improve facilities throughout the world, and when I get people to build new circuits to the standard which we're trying to reach, how can we go back to Silverstone? I negotiated a deal for them many years ago to give them enough money to build what we wanted. They didn't build it." Bernie Ecclestone, President and CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Association, insisting that Donington's failure would mean Britain no longer would be included on the F1 calendar, perhaps for good.

"I don't think we have done a good enough job, there is no point hiding from that face – we just have to get our heads down and work hard to fix it. We will rectify the problem as quickly as we can, even though that might not be as quickly as we would like." Martin Whitmarsh, Team Principal, Renault, commenting on the new Renault MP4-24 being significantly off the pace in recent testing

“It still has all the ingredients of a real old fashioned race circuit. Physically from the driver’s perspective, it is much harder. There is no point to relax. You do it roughly for the period of an Indy 500. For the car, the engineers at Audi believe that 12 hours here [Sebring] is roughly the same as 24 Hours of LeMans." Allan McNish, ALMS, Audi driver, 2-time champion of 12 Hours of Sebring, commenting on why some people believe Sebring is tougher than LeMans.

“It’s positive with the respect that they [General Motors] are able to get by another month without government loans. The downside is that while things are changing rapidly, it still gives the appearance GM doesn’t have internal control over what their costs are. It could cause confusion." Dennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group Inc., commenting on General Motors telling President Barack Obama’s autos task force that it won’t require the $2 billion originally requested by March 31 to survive this month.

"I'd like to go to all the different areas and see what's all about. It would be fun to go do that stuff. You can find out exactly how good you are against the best in the world. Those guys are outrageous. They are so good at being able to finesse a car and make it do what they want it to do. Here, you can try to make the car do what you want it to do, but you're really at its mercy. Those guys can make it do what they want it to do. To learn about that, see what it's like, that would be a lot of fun." Kyle Busch, top NASCAR driver, commenting on his interest in driving for the new USGPE team