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Red Bull Racing team management is “sorry, sorry, sorry” for the string of retirements suffered by Max Verstappen in 2017.
That’s according to the driver himself, who admits that any thoughts of a successful title bid this year are firmly over – for both him and the team.
Verstappen has failed to finish the last three races. In fact, he’s made it to the end in only four of the nine races so far this season. His latest disappointment in Austria was the result of a incident sparked by Toro Rosso’s Daniil Kvyat.
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But overall it’s the lack of reliability of the RB13 that is the biggest source of frustration for the Dutch teenager. He’s especially upset because his team mate Daniel Ricciardo seems unaffected, having picked up five consecutive podiums.
“After a while you think ‘How long can this go on?'” Verstappen is quoted by De Telegraaf newspaper. “I know the team is working hard and doing their best, but something else is always breaking.”
Verstappen was asked what the senior management at Red Bull – team principal Christian Horner, motorsport consultant Helmut Marko and owner Dietrich Mateschitz – had told him about the current situation.
“What did they say?” he shrugged. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. That should not happen.
“Yes, I have told them clearly I am not happy, but I think they see that already,” he added. “I no longer think about the world championship, but having good individual races.”
- Hardship will only make Verstappen stronger – Horner
The situation at Red Bull has led to speculation that Verstappen is looking to leave the team and join Ferrari. But Red Bull insists that it already has him locked into a contract for 2018.
“We have a contract and I think the team can do a good job,” Verstappen himself confirmed to Italy’s Autosprint.
“But the whole package must be able to get results. I think, at the moment, that is not the case. We can see clearly that we are not the fastest on the straight.
“It is absolutely not a good time and I am very disappointed. But it will be important to continue to push everyone forward, because there are still a lot of races,” he added.
“Despite the fact that there is a lot of speculation, there are no problems with our drivers,” Horner insisted. “They’re doing a fantastic job … I wouldn’t want any other drivers in our cars.”
But Horner did admit that the teams’ current form meant that any prospects for success in the constructors championship were over.
“I think the championships for us are not even worth thinking about. We’re a bit in no man’s land.
“What we’re very focused on is building on the progress that we’ve seen,” he added. “Particularly since Barcelona. And ensuring that the second half of the year for us is more competitive than the first half.”
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Despite its dismal track record this year, marked by under-performance and shaky reliability, Honda will not heavily change the architecture of its power unit for 2018.
Upon its return to F1 in 2015, the Japanese manufacturer’s first delivered an extraordinarily tightly bundled engine to partner McLaren, on the latter’s request.
This season, Honda revamped its approach with a more conventional format, and one which Honda boss Yusuke Hasegawa believes still has the ability to match the output of rivals Mercedes and Ferrari.
“We introduced a new power unit concept this year, so I would almost call this Year One again,” Hasegawa explained on the Honda website.
“But our aim is to develop the 2017 concept into the 2018 season and hopefully 2019 as well. So the engine weight, centre of gravity and the combustion concept is all going in the same direction as the other three engine manufacturers.
“It was good for us to do that. We can modify the specification of some of these parts to catch up with the other three engine manufacturers.
“Last year the engine concept was completely different, so with minor modifications we could not duplicate the same type of performance.
“That’s why we really needed to change the whole engine concept this year.”
- Brown: ‘We like what we’re seeing from Honda’
Honda’s first tests on its dyno revealed early on the unit’s reliability issues. But other troubles – undetectable on the dyno – also emerged once the McLaren MCL32 hit the track.
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“Many items we could not test on the dyno, so it is normal that we need to check some functions in the car.
“The oil tank is one of the biggest items, so we have a rig for the oil tank but we cannot recreate the same types of G forces and conditions as in the car.
“Of course, by design we have to consider the actual car situation in theory, but sometimes it is not always the same situation so that is why we had some issues with the oil tank first.
“The second issue was down to the vibrations. On the dyno, the model is stiffer and heavier, so it doesn’t create any synchronised vibrations, but on the car — with the gearbox and the tyres — there is a much lower level of inertia.
“Low inertia does not always create vibrations but it’s completely different from the dyno and that’s why we suffered a huge vibration on the car. Of course, we were aware some level of vibration would come in the car but it was much bigger than we expected.”
©WRI2
At the end of the day, Hasegawa believes Honda, through its trials and errors, has a solid foundation to build on for next year, although the identity of its partner, or partners, is still up in the air.
“We don’t stop developing, we need to keep updating. Of course the performance and results are the most important things but it’s all learning for the future too.
“Compared to last year we needed to modify the engine concept, but next year we will keep the same concept.
“It’s good that we can use the same concept because this year’s development and improvement is directly connected to next year. So that means we don’t need to stop the current development, and from that point of view we have already started next year’s design.”
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Zak Brown believes Formula 1 can make ‘significant inroads’ in Asia, starting with China, a country ripe for a second race says the McLaren boss.
But the American executive would also love to see Thailand appear one day on the F1 calendar as part of an updated ‘Asian Tour’ grouping key races in the region in addition to current venues Japan, Singapore and China.
“The Grand Prix in Shanghai is already well established, but we should explore the possibility of a race in another major city, such as Beijing, or a street race in a city like Wuxi, a place that’s growing ambitiously and enormously,” Brown wrote on a Linkedin Pulse blog.
“I also think the Shanghai Grand Prix, which is held at one of the most impressive and opulent bespoke racetracks in the world, characterises Formula One as being very exclusive and expensive.
“Whereas I feel that a Chinese city race would underscore the new values that we want the sport to inhabit – that it’s for the people, that it has a real energy, that it represents a fantastic way for brands to present themselves, and that it delivers fantastic ROI for sponsor-partners.
The Formula One Group has definitely earmarked Asia as a massive growth area for the sport, having just teamed up with marketing agency Lagardere Sports to help it build strategic partnerships and raise its profile in China.
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- Formula 1 presses on in China with partner Lagardere
“I’d personally love to see a race in Bangkok, Thailand,” Brown added.
“It’s such an incredible city, it would be a new venue for Formula 1, and I think you could create something truly unique and special, and that really plays to the passion and intensity of the country.
“Could you imagine a street race in Bangkok? I think that would be something really unbelievable.”
Brown also suggested that Formula 1 should review the start times of some of its traditional races in order to take into account the sport’s Asian audience.
“One of the criticisms I hear from fans in places like China and Japan is that the races are always shown in the middle of the night (if at all), so the sport tends only really to gather a hardcore and dedicated fan base,” he said.
“Perhaps we need to look at some of the timings of some of the conventional races, and see where there are opportunities to perhaps tweak the schedules so as to create a window of opportunity for our fans in Asia.”
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Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel set the fastest time on the second official in-season test day at the Hungaroring.
Vettel’s morning best of 1:17.124s on supersofts remained unbeaten in the afternoon heat. However, McLaren’s Lando Norris did improve on his already impressive early time as the day went on. Switching to ultrasofts saw him finish just 0.261s off the four-time world champion’s pace.
Norris completed 91 laps during his day in the car. That compared to just 40 for Vettel, who handed over the SF70H to Kimi Raikkonen at midday. The Finn went on to post 60 laps over the remainder of the test and was third fastest overall.
However all eyes were on Robert Kubica. The Polish driver was back in a current Formula 1 car for the first time in almost seven years. He completed 74 laps in the morning and a further 68 in the afternoon, ending the day with the fourth fastest time.
Kubica’s lap of 1:18.572s was on ultrasofts. It was almost two seconds faster than Nicholas Latifi had managed in the same car on Tuesday. He finished the test ahead of both two Toro Rosso drivers Carlos Sainz and Daniil Kvyat on the timesheets.
- Gallery: Robert Kubica’s comeback test in pictures
Lucas Auer won the day’s internal battle of prospective Force India drivers, four tenths faster than Nikita Mazepin. Mercedes’ George Russell was between them in eighth on the timing screens, having spent some of his day testing a new version of the Halo protection device.
Pierre Gasly put in a solid day’s work with 107 laps for Red Bull. However it was Williams’ Luca Ghiotto who put in the longest hours on Wednesday, completing a total of 161 circuits of the Hungaroring. Santino Ferrucci also hit triple digits but was only 12th fastest for the day in the Haas. He ended the day a second faster than Sauber’s Nobuharu Matsushita.
The afternoon session concluded with three rapid red flag stoppages in quick succession.
The first was for Danil Kvyat, who had taken over from Carlos Sainz at Toro Rosso after lunch. The Russian completed 54 laps and was sixth fastest for the day, having set his fastest lap before stopping on track with 28 minutes left on the clock.
There was a brief second red flag for debris on track before the track went green again with 15 minutes remaining. However that was cut short when George Russell stopped out on track in his Mercedes, and the session did not restart.
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He may only be a Mercedes junior driver but Georges Russell’s days away from the race track are anything but leisurely.
The 19-year-old, who enjoyed his first outing in Mercedes’ W08 in Hungary this week, currently races in the GP3 series but is often called upon during the week by the Silver Arrows squad to handle valuable simulator work.
And then there’s the physical training which is undertaken to keep the body in check with racing’s requirements, present and future.
This short Mercedes-AMG F1 video gives a glimpse into a typical day’s work with Mercedes for Georges Russell.
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Williams tech boss Paddy Lowe reckons that Felipe Massa would have won Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix without a rear damper failure which put the Brazilian out of the race.
Massa was P9 on the Baku grid on Sunday but found himself third behind Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel when the race was red-flagged on lap23 following the presence of debris on the track.
The Williams driver lost performance on the restart unfortunately and rapidly lost ground before retiring from the race.
“It was a failure of part of our damping system, it had locked the rear suspension solid, at a high rear ride height as well, so it was locked up at the full droop position,” explained Paddy Lowe.
“It was close on the restart with Daniel (Ricciardo) but in truth, the problem Felipe had with the car had existed from the minute the cars had left the pit lane.
“As we retraced it, it occurred on the in lap [before the red flag], which we hadn’t been able to spot in the data.
“We wouldn’t have been able to fix it anyway in the red flag period, so it was what it was. He had no pace, that’s why Daniel was able to overtake into Turn 1.”
- Stroll rejoices in ‘dream come true’ podium
Given how events at the front later unfolded and in light of team mate Lance Stroll’s race pace, Lowe believes Massa could have pulled off a comfortable win on Sunday without his misfortune.
“We saw the problem with Lewis (who pitted from the lead because of a loose headrest) and then Sebastian got his penalty,” said Lowe.
“When you put that together, Felipe could have been leading that race and finishing on the top step.
“Of course you worry, as there was a long way to go and so many cars had fallen out already. But he had the performance to sustain those positions.”
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The Formula One Group is teaming up with marketing agency Lagardere Sports to help it build strategic partnerships and raise its profile in China.
China has been targeted by the sport’s new owners as an area of expansion and a market which has yet to be fully exploited by F1, a move which could include adding a second race in the country.
In a joint statement issued by the two parties on Wednesday, Lagardere said it would “identify and secure strategic partners for Formula One in areas including event promotion, media rights, digital and brand partnerships, merchandising, talent development and racing team development.”
Formula One’s commercial managing Sean Bratches underlined the country’s growing passion for F1.
- China consortium eyes new F1 team venture
“We are keen to build on this, developing our brand through unique live entertainment experiences designed to get fans closer to the action,” he said.
McLaren executive Zak Brown recently said that China remained un untapped market given its huge potential.
“We still aren’t where we need to be in China,” Brown told Reuters last month.
“You could have a race in Beijing and Shanghai and I don’t think you’ve saturated Asia.”
News also filtered recently that a China-based consortium was working on a project involving a new Formula 1 team, with Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner revealing that members of the Milton Keynes outfit had been approached with offers to join the burgeoning venture.
Chinese money was also linked to an attempt by Ron Dennis to buy-out his fellow McLaren Group shareholders. But the subsequent bid, estimated to be worth $2.08 billion, failed, forcing Dennis to sell his remaining stake in the company.
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GAZA CITY – “My child became blind and lost the ability to speak, his dad died and his three brothers are seriously wounded. He still has not been told about the loss of his dad,” says the mother of 7-year-old Mohamad Badran.
Mohamad is in hospital for treatment after being seriously injured in Israel shelling of Gaza. “My only way to communicate with him is by hugging him,” his mother adds.
Israeli air attacks and shelling in Gaza have left more than 1,870 dead and thousands injured. They have caused damage to infrastructure and hundreds of homes, forcing a large number of families to seek shelter in schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).
Some of the children have suffered serious injuries which cannot be treated in Gaza due to the limited medical infrastructure and capacities caused by the Israeli blockade.
In a news note, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that Israeli airstrikes and shelling have taken a “devastating toll … on Gaza’s youngest and most vulnerable.” It said that at least 429 children had been killed and 2,744 severely injured.
Some of the children injured have suffered serious injuries which cannot be treated in Gaza due to the limited medical capacities caused by the Israeli blockade.According to UNICEF, about 400,000 children – half of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are children under the age of 18 – are showing symptoms of psychological problems, including stress and depression, clinging to parents and nightmares.
Monika Awad, spokesperson for UNICEF in Jerusalem, told IPS that 30 percent of dead as a result of the Israeli military attacks are children, and “UNICEF and its local partners have been implementing psychosocial support programs in Gaza schools where refugee families are sheltering.”
”We have a moral responsibility to protect the right of children to live in safety and dignity in accordance with U.N. charter for children’s rights,” she added.
However, the acute psychological effects of the Israeli attacks Gaza that have emerged among children, such as loss of speech, are among the biggest challenges that face psychotherapists.
Dr Sami Eweda, a consultant and psychiatrist with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (a local civil society organization working on trauma and healing issues), told IPS: “When the Israeli war against Gaza ends, psychotherapists will grapple with many expected dilemmas such as the cases of the murder of entire families and the murder of the parents who represent the central protection and tenderness for the children. Such terrible cases put children in a state of loss and shock.”
According to Eweda, “we first need to stop the main cause of these traumas and psychological problems, which is the Israeli war against Gaza, and then begin an emergency intervention to support children’s health and treat traumas and severe psychological effects, including the loss of speech, which is considered as one of the self-defence mechanisms for overcoming traumas.”
Throughout the Gaza Strip, where entire neighbourhoods such as Shujaiyeh and Khuza’a have been destroyed by the Israeli invasion and heavy bombardment, access to basic services is practically impossible.
People in these areas have been suffering difficulties in accessing drinking water and have been living in an almost complete blackout since the Israeli shelling of the power station which was the sole source of electricity in besieged Gaza.
Social Watch– a network of civil society organizations from around the world monitoring their governments’ commitments to end poverty and achieve gender justice – Thursday called on the international community to declare the Gaza Strip an “international humanitarian disaster zone”, as requested by Palestinian NGOs.
“The unrestricted violation of international law and humanitarian principles adds to the instability in the region and further fuels the arms race and the marginalization of the issues of poverty eradication and social justice that should be the main common priority,” said Social Watch.
“The recurrence of these episodes in Gaza is the result of not having acted before on similar war crimes and of not having pursued with good faith negotiations towards a lasting peace,” it added.In a press release, Save the Children, the world’s leading independent organization for promoting children’s rights, said: “Children never start wars, yet they are the ones that are killed, maimed, traumatized and left homeless, terrified and permanently scarred.”
“Save the Children will not stop until innocent children are no longer under fire and the root causes of this conflict are addressed. If the international community does not take action now, the violence against children in Gaza will haunt our generation forever.”
In an interview with IPS, Save the Children’s spokesperson in Gaza, Asama Damo, said: ”We call for a permanent ceasefire and for lifting the siege on Gaza to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and basic services to children.”
“We also need the international community to intervene to end the catastrophic humanitarian situation and fight the skin diseases that are widely spreading among the refugees at UNRWA schools due to overcrowding and congestion.”
According to UNRWA, 87 of their schools are being used as shelters by the refugees, half of whom are children under the age of 18. Ziad Thabet, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Gaza, told IPS:
“Israel deliberately targeted educational institutions and the education sector in general; large proportion of those killed and wounded are children and school students. Many schools and kindergartens were attacked.”
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In the current disastrous situation in Gaza, it seems not only that the burnt bodies of Gaza’s children are the heritage of war, but also that their educational and health future is being burned.
The received wisdom comes to us from every direction: poverty rates are declining and extreme poverty will soon be eradicated from the face of the earth. This narrative is delivered by the World Bank, the governments of rich countries, and – most importantly – the UN Millennium Development Campaign. Relax, they tell us. The world is getting better, thanks to the spread of free market capitalism and Western aid. Development is working, and soon, one day in the very near future, poverty will be no more.
It’s a comforting story, but unfortunately it’s just not true. Poverty is not disappearing as quickly as they say. In fact, according to some measures, poverty has been getting significantly worse. If we are to be serious about eradicating poverty, we need to cut through the sugarcoating and face up to some hard facts.
False accounting
The most powerful expression of the poverty reduction narrative comes from the Millennium Development Campaign. Building on the Millennium Declaration of 2000, the Campaign’s main goal has been to cut global poverty in half by 2015 – an objective that it proudly claims to have achieved ahead of schedule. But if we look beyond the celebratory rhetoric, it becomes clear that this claim is deeply misleading.
The world’s governments first pledged to end extreme poverty during the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. They committed to reducing the number of undernourished people by half before 2015, which, given the population at the time, meant cutting the poverty headcount by 836 million. Many critics claimed that this goal was inadequate given that, with the right redistributive policies, extreme poverty could be ended much more quickly.
But instead of making the goal more robust, global leaders surreptitiously diluted it. Yale professor and development watchdog Thomas Pogge points out that when the Millennium Declaration was signed, the goal was rewritten, as MDG-1, to halve the proportion of the world’s people living on less than a dollar a day. By altering the focus to income levels and switching from absolute numbers to proportions, the target became much easier to achieve. Given the rate of population growth, the new goal was effectively shrunk by 167 million. And that was just the beginning.
After the UN General Assembly adopted MDG-1, the goal was diluted two more times. First, they changed it from halving the proportion of impoverished people in the world to halving the proportion in only developing countries, thus taking advantage of an even faster-growing demographic denominator. Second, they moved the starting point of analysis from 2000 back to 1990, thus retroactively claiming all of the poverty reduction accomplished by China during the 1990s, which had nothing at all to do with the Millennium Campaign.
This statistical sleight-of-hand shrunk the target by a further 324 million. So what started as a goal to reduce the poverty headcount by 836 million has magically become only 345 million – less than half the original number. Having dramatically redefined the goal, the Millennium Campaign can claim that poverty has been halved when in fact it has not. The triumphalist narrative rests on an illusion of deceitful accounting.
Poor numbers
But there’s more. Not only have the goalposts been shifted, the definition of poverty itself has been massaged in a way that serves the poverty reduction narrative. What counts as poverty – the “poverty line” – is normally calculated by each nation, and is supposed to reflect what an average human adult needs to subsist. In 1990, Martin Ravallion, an Australian economist at the World Bank, noticed that the poverty lines of a few of the world’s poorest countries clustered around $1 per day. On Ravallion’s recommendation, the World Bank adopted this as the first-ever International Poverty Line (IPL).
But the IPL proved to be somewhat troublesome. Using this line, the World Bank announced in its 2000 annual report that “the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015.” This was alarming news, especially because it suggested that the free-market reforms imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on global South countries during the 1980s and 1990s in the name of “development” were actually making things worse.
This amounted to a PR nightmare for the World Bank. Not long after the report was released, however, their story changed dramatically and they announced the exact opposite news: while poverty had been increasing steadily for some two centuries, they said, the introduction of free-market policies had actually reduced the number of impoverished people by 400 million between 1981 and 2001.
This new story was possible because the Bank shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which, given inflation, was lower in real terms. With this tiny change – a flick of an economist’s wrist – the world was magically getting better, and the Bank’s PR problem was instantly averted. This new IPL is the one that the Millennium Campaign chose to use.
The IPL was changed a second time in 2008, to $1.25 (at 2005 PPP). And once again the story improved overnight. The $1.08 IPL made it seem as though the poverty headcount had been reduced by 316 million people between 1990 and 2005. But the new IPL – even lower than the last, in real terms – inflated the number to 437 million, creating the illusion that an additional 121 million souls had been “saved” from the jaws of debilitating poverty. Not surprisingly, the Millennium Campaign adopted the new IPL, which allowed it to claim yet further chimerical gains.
A more honest view of poverty
We need to seriously rethink these poverty measurements. The dollar-a-day IPL is based on the national poverty lines of the 15 poorest countries, but these lines provide a poor foundation given that many are set by bureaucrats with very little data. More importantly, they tell us nothing about what poverty is like in better-off countries. A 1990 survey in Sri Lanka found that 35% of the population fell under the national poverty line. But the World Bank, using the IPL, reported only 4% in the same year. In other words, the IPL makes poverty seem much less serious than it is.
The present IPL theoretically reflects what $1.25 could buy in the United States in 2005. But people who live in the US know it is impossible to survive on this amount. The prospect is laughable. In fact, the US government itself calculated that in 2005 the average person needed at least $4.58 per day simply in order to meet minimum nutritional requirements. The same story can be told in many other countries, where a dollar a day is inadequate for human existence. In India, for example, children living just above the IPL still have a 60% chance of being malnourished.
According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher line would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. And if we take China out of the equation, that number goes up to 852 million.
Some economists go further and advocate for an IPL of $5 or even $10 – the upper boundary suggested by the World Bank. At this line, we see that some 5.1 billion people – nearly 80% of the world’s population – live in poverty today. And the number is rising.
These more accurate lines suggest that the story of global poverty is much worse than the spin-doctored versions we are accustomed to hearing. The $1.25 line is absurdly low, but it remains in favour because it is the only line that shows any progress against poverty, and therefore justifies the present economic order. Every other line tells the opposite story. In fact, even the $1.25 line shows that, minus China, the poverty headcount is getting worse, with 108 million people added to the ranks of the poor since 1981. All of this calls the triumphalist narrative into question.
A call for change
This is important right now because the UN is currently negotiating the new Sustainable Development Goals that will replace the Millennium Campaign in 2015, and they are set to use the same dishonest poverty measures as before. They will leverage the “poverty reduction” story to argue for business as usual: stick with the status quo and things will keep getting better. We need to demand more. If the SDGs are to have any real value, they need to begin with a more honest poverty line – at least $2.50 per day – and instate rules to preclude the kind of deceit that the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign have practiced to date.
Eradicating poverty in this more meaningful sense will require more than just using aid to tinker around the edges of the problem. It will require changing the rules of the global economy to make it fairer for the world’s majority. Rich country governments will resist such changes with all their might. But epic problems require courageous solutions, and, with 2015 fast approaching, the moment to act is now.
A version of this essay also appeared on Al-Jazeera.