Michael Schumacher was happy with his step forward in Barcelona, while his teammate Nico Rosberg rued a step backwards.
After the “big joy” saga following Schumacher’s poor showing in Turkey two weeks ago, Rosberg was narrowly beaten to sixth place in the Spanish grand prix by his famous teammate.

Auto Motor und Sport believes Rosberg, who openly said the sister W02 ahead of him was struggling with “balance problems”, would have been happy if Mercedes had ordered Schumacher aside.

“Whoever wants to pass, must pass,” said Norbert Haug, ruling out the imposition of team orders in those circumstances.

“When the drivers are on different strategies, it might be an option. But today they both had the same strategy,” he added late on Sunday.

While Schumacher was happy to beat Rosberg, the latter was not happy with the performance of the team in Spain.

“We did a small step backwards,” he said. “The guys up there (on the podium) are pretty far away.”

Haug admitted: “We didn’t have a good speed. Red Bull and McLaren were in a different league, even if we were not the only ones who looked bad.

“But that’s no consolation,” he lamented.

Fernando Alonso was angry with Pirelli after Sunday’s Spanish grand prix.

To the delight of the partisan Spanish crowd, the Ferrari driver audaciously led at the start but ultimately finished a lap down and fifth.

“The superhard tyres … it’s a question for the Pirelli guys,” Alonso told EFE news agency after the Barcelona race.

“Why did they bring a harder tyre that grips less than the other one, degrades more and goes two seconds slower?”

Pirelli motor sport director Paul Hembery, however, insisted he was pleased in Spain, despite agreeing that four pitstops per driver is still too many.

“It was fantastic,” he said of the developed hard tyre. “There was zero wear, but of course you had to make it work.

“We did not want to see four pitstops (per driver), but you have to look at the leaders, who lapped the entire field.

“It is difficult for us to develop a tyre strategy that covers everybody,” he is quoted by Auto Motor und Sport.

He said one solution to the four-stop problem would be, when the hard tyre is to be supplied, for Pirelli to drop the soft tyre and replace it with the medium.

Helmut Marko suspects Ferrari is using a method to secretly listen in on Red Bull’s race strategies during grands prix.
Red Bull’s F1 consultant revealed his sensational suspicions on German RTL television after the Spanish grand prix on Sunday.

“We have noticed that Ferrari is doing some kind of espionage,” said the Austrian.

Explaining his suspicion, Marko said: “We called Mark (Webber) into the box relatively late, and yet they (Ferrari) managed to get Alonso in as well. They had been able to respond to us.”

It is believed Marko’s suspicions hardened when Red Bull issued fake commands for its drivers to pit in Barcelona, and Ferrari still moved to respond.

Bild newspaper said Ferrari has not yet commented.

Robert Kubica will not be returning to his race seat in 2011, team owner Gerard Lopez has announced.
The injured Pole left hospital after a nearly 80-day stay a month ago to begin rehabilitation.

But Lopez said on Onda Cero radio: “Maybe he will get to do a Friday test at some point, but for sure returning (to race) this season will not be possible.”

He added that “nobody knows, neither he nor the doctors nor ourselves” how Kubica’s injuries will affect his ability to race in F1 in the long term.

Bernie Ecclestone had meetings with two key people on the sidelines of the weekend’s Spanish grand prix.
Bild newspaper reports that the F1 chief executive met first with Adrian Sutil.

Force India’s Sutil is engulfed in a scandal that endangers his entire formula one career, with Renault team co-owner Eric Lux threatening to press criminal charges.

Bild said Ecclestone summoned Sutil in Barcelona because he “wanted to hear from Adrian the truth about the nightclub incident”.

Sutil was then photographed shaking 80-year-old Ecclestone’s hand.

Also in Barcelona at the weekend was Bahrain’s Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, according to British newspapers the Telegraph and Guardian.

He was a guest of McLaren, which is part-owned by a Bahraini state-controlled company, even though the Telegraph’s Tom Cary said the British team “kept their royal visitor under wraps”.

It emerges that as Ecclestone admitted in Spain that the 2011 calendar could be extended into December to make room for a rescheduled Bahrain race, the 80-year-old Briton had a “brief chat” with the Crown Prince.

Fernando Alonso’s decision to return to live in Spain will cost him $80 million in tax, according to the British tabloid newspaper The Mirror.
The report said the Ferrari driver had been living in Switzerland for tax reasons but decided to move back to his native Oviedo to be closer to family and friends.

“It’s great to go home. I’m happy to pay the money. I’m not poor — just a little bit less rich now,” he smiled.

Meanwhile, the Swiss newspaper Le Temps has quoted F1 team boss and owner Peter Sauber as admitting he is happy with a modest lifestyle.

The 68-year-old lives on the shores of Lake Zurich but he reportedly does not have a yacht, jet or luxury villa.

And he recently moved out of a five bedroom house in exchange for a three bedroom apartment.

“My children have left home and we don’t need much space,” he said, explaining that he doesn’t even drive a sports car.

“I have a car, that’s enough. Yachts, I like them but I admire them only in the port of Monaco. I don’t have enough time to be really interested.”

Amazingly, he also revealed he is not really a motor racing fanatic.

“I’m not a big fan of racing. What interests me is not winning but the path it takes to get there,” said Sauber.

The McLaren drivers and Mark Webber escaped with mere reprimands on Sunday after being investigated by the stewards.

The stewards, including former F1 driver Mark Blundell, looked into whether the trio went too quickly for the yellow flag triggered by Heikki Kovalainen’s crash.

McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh welcomed the “sensible” reprimand, rather than an actual penalty, because he insists his drivers were “off the throttle” in the yellow flag zone.

Steward Blundell, however, said on BBC terlvision that the drivers were reprimanded because their “personal sectors improved” within the yellow zone.

Meanwhile, HRT team boss Colin Kolles said after Sunday’s race that he is not protesting the outcome of the Spanish grand prix.

But because he is so unhappy with teams running what he calls “illegal” blown exhaust configurations, he vowed to protest at “some time” during the Monaco round next weekend.

Sebastian Vettel extended his runaway championship lead on Sunday despite intense pressure from Lewis Hamilton.

The German, who finished less than a second ahead of McLaren’t Hamilton at the flag in Barcelona, ended the race 41 points ahead after just 5 races.

“McLaren were very strong, Lewis in particular,” said the Red Bull driver, after Hamilton’s late-race challenge in the surprisingly fast MP4-26.

The ‘DRS’ system was less effective this weekend than at previous events, but the 66-lap race was still exciting, particularly after Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso led at the start to the delight of his home crowd.

“(P1) isn’t our position at the moment. There are clearly two teams ahead of everybody and at the moment we need to change the situation,” said Alonso.

Meanwhile, pole sitter Mark Webber (4th), Hamilton and Jenson Button (3rd) are under investigation by the stewards for failing to slow for yellow flags during the race.

“Let’s see what they say,” Button said on British television BBC1.

The saga about F1′s future engine regulations has taken a twist, with the possibility that both four-cylinder and V8s could be pitted against one another in 2013.
We reported earlier on Sunday that, after a meeting with the manufacturers in Barcelona, Jean Todt had vowed to push ahead with the scheduled new regulations.

But F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, who is staunchly opposed to scrapping the V8s, said FIA president Todt is now proposing to let some V8s continue to fire in 2013.

“But I mean, equivalency formulas never work, do they?” he is quoted by Reuters.

The situation reminds of 2006, when after the current V8 engines were introduced, Toro Rosso ran a performance-limited V10.

Fernando Alonso is concerned the banned high rear wing seen in Barcelona this weekend could have given Ferrari’s rivals some clever ideas.
The FIA moved to ban Ferrari’s interpretation of the rules when its new rear wing, debuted in Friday practice, was 3cm higher than normal due to a loophole about gurney flaps and slot-gap separators.

“The wing was one of the new parts we introduced here but the FIA decided that we couldn’t use it,” Spaniard Alonso is quoted by AS sports newspaper.

“It gave us a small improvement, maybe a tenth or a tenth and a half, so it is not something dramatic.

“There is nothing more to say; in F1 the rules are interpreted to the limit and sometimes you are allowed and sometimes you are not,” he added.

Alonso insisted: “The important thing is that no one comes to Monaco with something similar and they are allowed to use it.”

Ross Brawn has added his voice to the general feeling in the paddock this weekend that F1 should think hard about rescheduling the Bahrain grand prix in 2011.

With Bernie Ecclestone admitting India could be delayed until early December to make room on the calendar for Sakhir, Renault boss Eric Boullier sounded unenthused.

“The question has to be raised. Does F1 have to go there?” said the Frenchman in Barcelona. “It is maybe too early to go there after the dramas.”

His Mercedes counterpart Brawn, meanwhile, has another reason for not wholeheartedly supporting the idea of extending the calendar beyond its currently-scheduled late November finale.

He told Germany’s motorsport-magazin.com that a December finale would shorten his hard-working staff’s holidays.

“Our boys, by the end of January, are back to work completely and very busy. And because of the resource restrictions we can’t put any more people on or employ a second race team,” said Brawn.

Pedro de la Rosa has revealed he baulked at joining the Hispania team this season.
The Spanish veteran lost his Sauber seat last year and became Pirelli’s test driver, but despite reportedly pushing for an HRT cockpit for 2011 he has instead returned to the reserve role at McLaren.

Asked by AS newspaper in Barcelona if it is true Hispania had been a genuine option for this season, the 40-year-old answered: “Perhaps that question should go to … well, not (Jose Ramon) Carabante, I don’t know who.

“The truth is that I put a condition on it that they had to have an ambitious sporting project, but then the Toyota connection did not happen and I didn’t want to go there any more,” revealed de la Rosa.

“I didn’t want to. I wanted to do well, to make them stronger, but there wasn’t the right ingredients to be there,” he added.

Mark Webber on Saturday said he is worried formula one could be falling into the pack.

The Australian repeated his 2010 pole position at the Circuit de Catalunya on Saturday, but he was a full second slower than he was for the quickest qualifying time a year ago.

But that is not the main concern; the degradation of the tyres supplied this year by Pirelli means that at the end of a long run, the pace can now be compared to the junior GP3 category.

“We need to be careful with our long run pace that we don’t get too close to the other categories,” said the Australian.

“I don’t think the long runs are particularly impressive for a formula one car round here,” added Webber.

“If you look at a GP3 lap time, I think they did a 1:38 and some of my laps at the end of my long run (in practice) were in the 1:30s, and I think the budget’s a little bit different,” he said.

Agreed Lewis Hamilton: “Too slow at the moment, isn’t it?”

Kimi Raikkonen has admitted the possibility of returning one day to formula one.
After walking away from the sport at the end of 2009, the talented Finn and former title winner switched to world rallying and on Friday finished 15th on his debut in the low-tier pickup truck NASCAR series.

Asked in Charlotte about his controversial decision to quit formula one as one of its highest rated and paid drivers, he is quoted as responding by Turun Sanomat newspaper: “There were many reasons.

“But I haven’t said it is final. Currently I don’t miss F1. I wanted to do different things and now have had a great opportunity to try NASCAR.

“I haven’t said I will never go back to F1,” added the 31-year-old. “At the moment I have no plans for what I am going to do next year.”

Mark Webber broke his teammate Sebastian Vettel’s run of pole positions on Saturday, after impressive earlier practice pace at the scene of his win a year ago.

But it emerged shortly after the qualifying session in Barcelona that while the energy-recovery system was working on the Australian’s dominant RB7, the one aboard Vettel’s did not work in Q2 and Q3.

“It’s not right to say that’s why Mark got pole — he deserved it,” insisted Vettel.

“We had some problems but Mark did a good job. He did a better job today. I’m sure we will have it (KERS) tomorrow,” he added.

Lewis Hamilton starts from third, but he thinks the gap between Red Bull and McLaren has only widened in Spain. Worse still, he flat-spotted the set of soft Pirelli tyres he must start Sunday’s race with.

“Fortunately we can rebalance the wheels (for the race) so it shouldn’t be a problem,” said the Briton.