F1 Features

Jenson Button: "Obviously, I'm thrilled to achieve pole position - the first for me and the team. This is a fantastic moment in my career and the team's history, and I'm just so pleased for everyone who is now starting to see all their hard work and support pay off."

Drivers: Felipe Massa (Sauber-Petronas) and Jarno Trulli (Renault). Press conference:

Team McLaren-Mercedes #1 driver Kimi Raikkonen describes a lap of Imola - site of this weekend's San Marino Grand Prix... "Accelerating hard along the short pit straight at Imola, you reach 180mph / 289kph in seventh gear as you wind through the scenic Italian countryside.

Michael Schumacher: "It is the dream result at the end of a superb weekend. We looked good on Friday, struggled a bit on Saturday morning and then took the front row and finished one-two. It was a tough race, as we had to manage the brakes and keep an eye on the tyres."

Vitor Meira of Brazil is the latest open-wheel driver to be announced this month in the busy world of open-wheel racing.

Drivers: Michael Schumacher (Ferrari), Juan Pablo Montoya (WilliamsF1-BMW) and Jenson Button (BAR-Honda). TV unilaterals:

1. Michael Schumacher Germany Ferrari-Ferrari 1min 24.408secs 2. Rubens Barrichello Brazil Ferrari-Ferrari 1min 24.482secs +0.074secs 3. Juan Montoya Colombia Williams-BMW 1min 24.998secs +0.590secs

When today's F1 championship steps foot on the sands of the Middle East at the end of this month it will be the first forage into a new world that will include China within months and, in the next decade, more new world territories than Schumacher has championships.

Hi folks... I'm back - welcome to my first column of 2004. That can mean only one thing - that the new season is nearly upon us, and I think it is going to be quite exceptional.

by Andy Stobart Just a couple of days before the start to the 2004 Formula One season, Renault driver Jarno Trulli was down the road from Melbourne at Geelong Kart Club enjoying some laps with the circuit to himself in a kart bearing his own name.

Mark Twain once claimed that reports of his demise had been exaggerated, after a premature obituary appeared in the press, and team boss Eddie Jordan was mindful of the quote as he unveiled his latest Formula One contender yesterday.

With the Renault F1 Team having completed the raw carbon monocoque for the R24 (see previous stories), the time has come to make the final transformation and apply the full race livery.

WilliamsF1's FW26 created a stir when it was unveiled at Valencia's Circuit Ricardo Tormo on Monday, but some Formula One insiders believe that its radical-looking front end treatment may not be as big a step forward as the team may want its rivals to believe.

Formula One this season was pretty darn good, wasn't it? Eight different winners, the championship battle went down to the wire and, prior to the US GP - the penultimate race of the season, three drivers were still in with a shot of securing the 2003 F1 drivers' championship.

The final stage in producing Renault's next Formula One car has arrived, as the team prepares to assemble the chassis. It is often called a monocoque, but that is one of the most common misnomers in F1, as the 'monocoque': not quite what it seems.

It was 9.30 am yesterday [Thursday] when the Piaggio P180, the Piaggio plane that bears the Prancing Horse symbol, touched down at Baccarini airport in Grosseto.

In order to streamline the future stages of the 2004 race car build process, and optimise the reliability of the R24, a full-scale chassis is already being replicated at Renault F1's factory in Enstone.

Having already gone through the build-up to the mould-making process (see previous feature), Renault F1's new car, the R24, is well on the way to seeing its first monocoque come to life.

The innovative F1 Scholarship - designed to take a driver all the way to contemporary Formula One competition on talent alone - has today released further details on their unique competition.

Less than two weeks after the final race of the 2003 season, the production of a key element of the new Renault Formula One chassis is well underway.

Driver: Michael Schumacher (Ferrari). TV unilaterals:

Drivers: Jenson Button (BAR-Honda), Heinz-Harald Frentzen (Sauber), Kimi Raikkonen (McLaren) and Michael Schumacher (Ferrari). Questions from the floor.

If you talk to senior Bridgestone engineer Kees van de Grint, a Dutch engineer who has come to Formula One through years of karting, it takes a while before he starts to talk about those round black things.

West McLaren-Mercedes driver Kimi Raikkonen describes a lap of Indianapolis - site of this weekend's US Grand Prix: