Martin Brundle has joined the British Broadcasting Corporation’s team that will cover Grand Prix racing for the next five years. Alright, this is not exactly new news, but it is most certainly good news. Brundle is one of the many reasons for watching Grand Prix racing on the television.

And there’s more. The BBC team will also include David Coulthard, Eddie Jordan and… yes, good old Murray Walker. All three, in their very different ways, will bring insight, controversy and humour to the coverage next season. DC and EJ will be on board as expert observers while Muddly Talker will communicate with the audience via the worldwide web, answering questions and no doubt venting a few opinions.

There have long been whispers that Martin Brundle had become disillusioned with all the politics and shenanigans that infest the modern F1 paddock. Maybe he had, and certainly his relationship with the FIA has, on occasion, became a little frosty. But good sense has prevailed and the man who stepped from the cockpit into the commentary box will continue to entertain us with his no-nonsense approach to the business of motor racing on TV. Let’s hope he starts the new season in the pithiest possible form with all the humour, honesty and expertise that we know he can throw at us on a Sunday afternoon. We don’t yet know if there will be the right chemistry with race commentator Jonathan Legard but Brundle must be allowed the space to do his thing. His grid walks for the ITV coverage were a joy to watch – it is much more difficult than it looks to ‘door-step’ folk on the grid just minutes before the start of a race.

David Coulthard will, I believe, surprise many people with his broadcasting skills. His easy manner, quick wit and intelligence, not to mention his very recent experience in the car, will add a new dimension. As for EJ, well, the only surprise will come if he is not his usual self – that is over the top, controversial and straight down the line. And, if I’m not very much mistaken, the amazing Murray Walker will be well worth reading as he taps into the BBC F1 website. The man is so damn enthusiastic and energetic at a time of life when most of us might be lifting off just a little.

So, yes, you can probably tell that I like the look of the new team. I am qualified, I think, to pre-judge this new era, having spent 25 years of my life in the business of making TV programmes. ITV did a good job, brought some new ideas, and the advertising breaks allowed time to make a cup of tea, fetch a beer, or whatever. The BBC will have to work hard to bring a new dimension. Steve Rider, a consummate professional in front of camera, thinks the Beeb will do a very good job. He should know, having worked for the Corporation for many, many years.

And finally, as they say, let’s have more pits-to-car radio, more insight into those all-important tactics and more of that new helmet camera that we saw in Brazil this year. The trick, with sport on TV, is to take the viewers inside the fence, lead them right in there, amongst the noise, the brake dust, the muck and bullets. You can’t beat being there but it’s the next best thing.

Two British World Champions from two very different eras, plus Lewis’s special homecoming

Broadspeed Capri reborn

A classic car driven by none other than touring car hero Andy Rouse is back on track

1000mph on land!

It’s not just the most ambitious LSR bid ever – it’s a chance to inspire young engineers

Formula 1 season review

Martin Brundle and Nigel Roebuck cast an expert eye over a drama-filled season of F1

Kimi Raikkonen

He’s not always a man of many words, but he opened up to Motor Sport about a tough ’08

Road Test: Ferrari California

Cutting-edge technology under its swooping bonnet helps Ferrari’s latest to shine

Lunch With… John Watson

Long before Lewis mania, ‘Wattie’ was Britain’s top F1 driver for six straight seasons

Al Unser Jr

His battle with alcoholism behind him, the US racer is enjoying life as an IRL driver coach

Tony Crook

One of the early post-Second World War racers recalls his dices with Moss and Salvadori

Steve Soper vs John Cleland

The pair relive their angry clash in the 1992 BTCC finale, and how they reached a truce

Martini Festival

Jarama plays host to the historic race event

RAC rally

Old-style rally not to be confused with Rally GB

Classic Racing Cars

Lola T70: Eric Broadley’s gorgeous sports-racer

You’ve probably noticed – Britain has a new Formula 1 World Champion. He cut it fine, but Lewis Hamilton did just enough to claim his place alongside the eight other Grand Prix champions from the British Isles. We’d never seen drama like it.

Hamilton has enjoyed his fair share of magazine covers, and now he has another to his name. The January 2009 edition of Motor Sport – our 1001st of course – is graced by his familiar figure as we mark his achievement in suitable fashion. But this being Motor Sport, we’ve tackled Hamilton’s success with our own special twist.

By happy coincidence, Lewis is champion exactly 50 years after Britain’s first – Mike Hawthorn. Thus, the golden boy of 1950s motor racing inspired us to combine two very different eras into a single image for our cover. Inside, we reflect on the vast differences between two heroes of their generations, but also acknowledge the parallels, and one important fact: despite all the distractions that surround the modern sport, racing is still racing. The essence hasn’t changed at all.

Hamilton deserves his latest Motor Sport cover. But there was a faction in our office that wanted to keep to the best traditions of the magazine by choosing a cover subject completely at odds with trends – and relevance to anything in particular. Yes, I was tempted, too: the lairy green Capri featured inside would have looked great with our famous masthead…

We hooked up tin-top legend Andy Rouse with a recreation of the Broadspeed Capri he helped develop for driver Dave Matthews back in 1973 – and the reborn car looks fabulous. Love ’em or hate ’em, nothing is more evocative of the ’70s than a mint model of the testosterone-charged Ford.

Elsewhere, we bring you the technical challenge of Richard Noble’s new Land Speed Record attempt, as BloodhoundSSC aims for the mind-bending mark of 1000mph; Martin Brundle joins Nigel Roebuck for a bowl of pasta and a grappa or three to talk over the 2008 F1 season; Simon Taylor meets John Watson for lunch (he could have been Britain’s seventh F1 World Champion!); and Andrew Frankel gives us his verdict on the new Ferrari California drop-top.

As ever, an eclectic mix from the past and the present, the great and the good. Happy reading.

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Dear Nigel,
If the Ferraris and the McLarens had swapped places into that first corner at Fuji, would Ferrari have been penalised for messing up McLaren’s start?
Alastair Warren

Dear Nigel,
What are your memories of Rob Walker? I grew up and still live in Indianapolis, and it was Walker, through Road & Track magazine, who fuelled my love of Grand Prix Racing way back in the late 1960s.
Steve Wyant

Dear Nigel,
I am a huge fan of Jenson Button, and have been since well before he hit Formula 1. I, like many other British fans, am dismayed at the lack of progress – or even negative progress! – at Honda. I felt originally that Jenson had the opportunity to go to Honda and build the team around him, a la Schumacher at Ferrari, and that they would go on to achieve an immense amount. However, here we are again saying “maybe next season…”

I know that they now have Ross Brawn, and the new 2009 aero regs should negate Honda’s seemingly boundless confusion over the science of aerodynamics, but given their inability to maximise their vast resources, budget and knowledge base, can anything help them? I would dearly love to see Jenson win the championship he is capable of, but if not Honda, who now at this stage of his career, and with so many younger drivers out there (Vettel, Kubica, Hamilton) will give him the chance?
Scott Chesney

Dear Nigel,
What is your opinion about former F1 driver Andrea de Cesaris, especially about the Alfa years of 1982 and ’83?
Goran Manov

I wanted to talk to Hall for a book project I’m working on and also for an upcoming column in Motor Sport. The tall Texan has many tales to tell and plenty of strong opinions, too. We covered a lot of ground but I was amazed when he told me that none of the Chaparrals ever saw the inside of a wind tunnel. Back in those days most race teams had nothing like the sponsorship and technical resources we’re familiar with today, nor were there any wind tunnels with rolling roads or ground planes designed specifically for ground-effect aero development. Hall explained the very basic method he used to calibrate the downforce generated by his Chaparrals.

“We started rudimentarily measuring downforce back in ‘64 when I figured out that I needed to fix the nose on the first mid-engined Chaparral,” Hall recounted. “We measured downforce with a cable and a chart measured off the suspension so that we knew what the lift or downforce was on the car. We just measured it with a pencil that ran across a piece of paper. We did that for a long time and it was easy to set that up and run it, even on the 2K Indy car we ran in 1979-’81. We did that a little in Texas before we took it anywhere so we had a pretty good idea of what the downforce was.

“We calibrated the suspension by just rolling the car out and putting weights on it so we knew what load it took to move the car up and down. We had a cable drive that drove a pencil and a roll of paper that was run by a little motor so you could set your zero point. You would go out and make a run and push a button and make a mark across the paper so we knew what the front and rear downforce was. You could run a couple of different speeds and then you could put it on a graph. You knew that it was increasing as the square of the speed so you knew what the curve looked like and you pretty much had the downforce over a speed range. That was pretty simple to do.”

Hall’s method of measuring the air pressure or downforce on the surface of his car’s wings or bodywork was equally simple in concept. “The other thing we did was when we needed to change the surface we had a manometer that was just a bunch of u-tubes made out of tigon tubing and full of coloured water,” Hall related. “If you were in a sports car you put it in the seat beside you and then went out and tapped a bunch of holes in the. You ran these to one side of the tubes and ran the other one to a pitot tube so you could get the dynamic air pressure on the surface.

“I originally did it with a Polaroid camera. I had a Polaroid camera mounted on the dash and the manometer mounted on the seat back beside me. I didn’t even have a pitot tube for a static pressure source. I read in a book somewhere that a guy in WWI thought about doing this. The way he thought about doing it was you took a thermos bottle and put a piece of tubing in it and right before you made the test you opened it up then closed it so you had static air pressure in it. Then you went out to make your run and compared it to the pressures you got, then opened it and made sure it didn’t change.

“In a matter of about twenty minutes that thermos bottle would maintain an even enough temperature that the pressure wouldn’t change much. So you had some static pressure while you were sitting in the pit and you also had static pressure when you were going down the straightaway. It’s simple-minded, but pretty tricky! And that’s the way we started.

“Then we bought a light airplane pitot tube and mounted it out front of the car. We found a static pressure place where we could run that pitot tube that matched the thermos. Then we had a static pressure source all the time.”

Thus began the serious science of racing car aerodynamics. Of course, Hall had no idea about the depth of the pandora’s box he was opening but he is without doubt the father of the modern aerodynamically-driven racing car. (Above – Honda’s latest wind tunnel).

Actually, I’m saying ‘Ecclestone’s financial demands’, but in reality what we’re talking about these days is CVC, the private equity company to whom he sold the commercial rights to F1 a while ago. Bernie still does the deals with race organisers and TV companies, but these days is merely an employee, albeit an extraordinarily well rewarded one.

Looking at the changing shape of the World Championship, it’s pretty clear that now, even more than before, a country’s inclusion is dependent on its ability to pay, period. Talk all you will about ‘the emergence of Asia’ and all the rest of it; more than ever it’s clear that it doesn’t really matter a toss where the race is, so long as there’s an eye-watering cheque to go with it.

In one part of the world, we have races in Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and China, with Grands Prix also imminent in India and South Korea. In the Americas, meantime, we have… Brazil, and that’s it. All looks a touched skewed, doesn’t it? And we haven’t even mentioned Europe, traditionally the cultural home of F1.

The 2009 World Championship was originally supposed to feature 19 races, but some time ago it was announced that the French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours (due to be the last there, anyway) had been cancelled, thanks to the credit crunch, and now Canada is off, too. Thus we are down to 17 races, one fewer than this year.

At one time, when Bernie personally owned the commercial rights to F1, it was in his gift – should he choose to do so – once in a while to cut a race organiser some slack, to compromise, but since selling out to CVC things are a little different, for the company borrowed hugely to finance the buyout, and the interest payments alone on those loans are staggering. F1, essentially, is in debt – and in a big way. Hence it takes its show to where the money is.

It’s one thing, however, to lose places like Magny-Cours and, in 2010, Silverstone. What must be infinitely more disturbing to Ecclestone – and, particularly, CVC – is that now the authorities in Shanghai are saying it is by no means certain that the Chinese Grand Prix contract will be renewed after its expiry in 2010.

Were it a normal commercial enterprise, there would be no question of the Shanghai race’s remaining on the calendar, for, as in Malaysia, there is remarkably little interest in F1 in China, as the pitiful race attendances have long demonstrated. The stands might look reasonably full: not too many of the people in them have paid to come in.

Commercially, therefore, it’s a lost cause, but it had always been believed that this didn’t matter, because China was awash with cash, and government money would be endlessly available to maintain the prestige of having a Grand Prix.

Changing times, perhaps. Qiu Weichang, of the Shanghai Administration of Sports, said recently that ‘an assessment’ was being carried out. “We want to create a win-win situation,” he said, “for our side and for Bernie Ecclestone, and the F1 organisers as well. We would, of course, at least like to break even…”

Reasonable enough. But if Shanghai disappears, unlamented by most, into the World Championship ether, all manner of places are available to replace it – and places, what’s more, that come complete with fans, in countries where F1 has a traditional following. Places like Imola and… Silverstone. For that to happen, though, the tab for a Grand Prix will need to come down dramatically. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, it will have to…

First, an operation on my right hand, with subsequent physiotherapy. Then came a rather nasty ‘lurgy’ which rendered me listless and spaced out, not to mention some aches and pains from a chest infection. Ah, the joys of winter in England.

Actually, it’s not cold here, not yet anyway, but lots of people are sniffing and coughing and generally moping around, groping for tissues. Yuk.

So, back on track and firing on about 10 of 12, I see that Mr Ecclestone is suggesting that we pin medals on racing drivers instead of awarding them points towards the F1 World Championship. And Messrs Kolles and Gascoyne have departed the Force India team. And McLaren has struck up a technical partnership with Mr Vijay Mallya’s valiant outfit. And Sebastien Loeb was very quick in a Red Bull Grand Prix car in Barcelona. And Rubens Barrichello may not be staying with the Honda F1 team which would be sad because he’s a great bloke. And on it goes… it’s all happening and the birds in the trees are whispering of a lively and controversial winter in the sport.

Let’s start with medals. Mr E thinks that Grand Prix racing should adopt an Olympian style of reward; a gold for the winner and well, you know how it goes. Apparently he is serious, though you never can be sure with such a bright, and mischievous, chap. Is it a good idea? Would it have made the final race of the season in Brazil any more exciting? I am not convinced. A more interesting wheeze might be to have an Olympic Grand Prix every four years, with the winner of this being given the gold. A new track in Athens perhaps? Great city, lovely weather and plenty of efficient infrastructure thanks to the Games themselves.

What is going on at Force India? I spent many hours talking to Mike Gascoyne (above) in Valencia this past summer and I am not so shocked to hear that he has left this gutsy little team. He is a highly intelligent bloke, is Mr Gascoyne, and I got the impression that, unless things went his way, he’d be on his way. He’s probably going to sail around the world before returning to dry land to parachute into another racing team that needs urgent help with making its cars go a lot faster. I am hoping to talk to him for the magazine soon.

In a couple of weeks time I am going to Wales. Not my favourite place at this time of  year but, hey, someone has to do it. I am going to talk to the amazing Monsieur Sebastien Loeb as he prepares for the oddly-titled event known as the Wales Rally GB. I was offered a chance of talking to the man in the South of France but my Editor wants me to go to Wales. He’s the boss, so that’s where I’m going, and because I can ask other rally folk what they think of the World Champion. What I think is that he is a truly impressive bloke – did you see his times in the Barcelona F1 test? Unbelievable. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Loeb and Rossi on the Grand Prix grid.

Meanwhile the A1GP teams are in Malaysia. I could have gone there too, but that’s all to do with being ‘laid up’ these past few weeks. I do like A1GP racing, and the people involved, very much, and I would have liked to have seen the pandas in China, and the elephants in Malaysia. It’s an interesting series this, combining some local cultures with the race weekends. Anyway, lots to talk about this coming winter, so I hope you will all be ‘on line’ as they say, and ready with some pithy and politically incorrect ideas.

There’s a nasty ‘lurgy’ infecting the global economy too. But, as Winston Churchill used to say, KBO.