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The Racing Point F1 team name will change before the start of next season, team boss Otmar Szafnauer has confirmed.

The provisional entry list for the 2019 world championship lists the team and chassis name as Racing Point, but that is just a temporary measure as the Silverstone outfit makes the transition from its former identity as Force India.

The team became Racing Point Force India at the Belgian GP when it was accepted as a new entry.

The FIA was keen for the team to use the company name created for the acquisition by new owner Lawrence Stroll in order to distinguish the new organisation from the previous incarnation as Sahara Force India.

However, Stroll does not have any particular affinity to the name, and a new one is currently under discussion.

"It is just a placeholder to indicate future change which will take place and be announced before the 2019 season," Szafnauer told Motorsport.com.

Changing a team and chassis name is less complicated than it used to be, and teams no longer have to get the permission of the F1 Commission, and hence the support of rivals.

Instead they just have to apply to the FIA and follow the correct procedure.

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Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow: Vettel (5) / Leclerc (16)

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The word “winnow” (pronounced: “win”–“oh”) was selected because it perfectly describes the meticulous and disciplined route that PMI is following to achieve its ambitious vision of a smoke-free future. The word—and PMI’s vision—is about focus, transparency, care and single-minded determination.

“Winnow” originally referred to the removal of chaff from grain, but it came to be used more broadly to describe the separating out of the unnecessary, the extraction of the good and distinguishing what is true from what is inaccurate or misleading. For PMI, this is critically important in a world of information overload.

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The FIA has tweaked the way penalties will be applied to Formula 1 grids from 2019, in an attempt to encourage those who have penalties to take part in qualifying.

A rule was introduced this year that put anyone with more than 15 places of power unit grid penalties to the back of the grid.

When more than one driver was affected the starting order was determined by the order in which the offence was committed, i.e. when the new elements were first used on track.

That led to the sometimes farcical situation of drivers leaving their garages well before the start of a practice session and parking at the end of the pitlane with their engine switched off, thus bagging their spot on the grid ahead of anyone who joined the queue behind them.

The most extreme example was at the Russian GP, when four cars were waiting at pitlane exit.

To prevent this from happening in 2019 penalised drivers will instead line up on the grid in the order in which they qualified, which will also provide an incentive for them to set competitive times in qualifying, instead of making just a token appearance in Q1 and then saving tyres, as was often the case this year.

The FIA has also clarified that any driver who is outside the 107% rule and is allowed to start will be placed at the back come what may, behind any drivers with power unit penalties.

In other changes to the sporting regulations confirmed by the World Motor Sport Council on Wednesday, teams will now have to ensure that fuel handling procedures are the same for testing as they are at race events.

Since the Williams garage fire at the 2012 Spanish GP the rules have specified precautions such as the use of protective equipment and dry-break couplings, and FIA observers had noticed that the same procedures required for race weekends have not always been employed in testing.

In another piece of tidying up, the rules now specify that cars will be kept under yellow flag conditions until they reach the control line after the safety car returns to the pits.

While no overtaking was allowed in such circumstances hitherto green flags had been displayed around the track when the safety car entered the pits, creating a “mixed message” that the FIA has now addressed.

From now on the SC boards will be withdrawn, the yellow flags will continue to be shown, and the leaders will see the green lights and green flags only at the line.

The final change to the 2019 sporting regulations is to allow unrestricted CFD simulations to be carried out for the development of cars in accordance with the 2021 regulations. This has been done in the past when teams were working on future rules, and reflects the fact that they will be providing feedback that will help F1 and the FIA shape the 2021 rules.

Minor adjustments to the F1 technical regulations are the final signing off on bodywork details relating to the 2019 front wing changes, while an extra 3kgs has been added to the minimum weight, boosting it from 740 to 743kgs.

Usually such weight hikes are related to specific rule changes, such as the addition of the halo or the move to wider wheels and tyres, but in this case teams simply lobbied the FIA and complained that they were struggling to get the weight down to 740.

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Pirelli has revealed its compound choices for the first four races of the 2019 Formula 1 season, marking the first time that the new simplified designation of hard, medium and soft has been used.

Although those three basic names will be in play at each event, Pirelli has a new C1-C5 system for notifying which actual compound is being used on a given weekend.

The C1 is the hardest compound in the 2019 range, and the C5 is the softest. There are now only five tyres in the range, instead of the seven that were available previously, with the old hard having rarely been seen in 2018. There was also an orange superhard back-up tyre, which was not intended for use.

Three of the early races will use the C2, C3 and C4, namely Australia, China and Azerbaijan.

In the case of Shanghai this represents a change, because in 2018 Pirelli used the medium, soft and ultrasoft, skipping the supersoft. This year there will be no step.

The company’s hardest 2019 tyre will be seen in Bahrain, where the C1, C2 and C3 compounds will be used.

Pirelli has made the announcement on Monday because there’s a 14-week deadline for flyaway races, whereas it's only eight weeks for European events. Thus the next confirmation is likely to be for Canada in February, followed by Spain.

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Say goodbye to the days of “supersoft” tires and all of that junk in Formula One (officially, at least). Next year, Pirelli’s tire-naming system in F1 will be slightly less arbitrary but a whole lot more confusing—so confusing, in fact, there’s not even enough room in this first paragraph to explain why it’s confusing.


Here we go, everybody. Put your thinking caps on.

Formula One tire compounds, before this coming season, had names that didn’t have much meaning and couldn’t be made sense of without simply memorizing which were the softest: supersoft, ultrasoft, hypersoft, ubersoft, excessivelysoft, softerthanyourgutduringthewinter. Fine, those last three weren’t real.

Anyway, in an effort to simplify the tire names and make them more logical to someone who doesn’t memorize F1 tire compounds like multiplication tables, Pirelli said earlier this year that it would create two separate naming systems for its compounds. One of those naming systems would be for the compounds at the track, and the other for the compounds themselves.

Since F1 only designates three dry-weather compounds each race and there are five dry compounds next season, according to Motorsport.com, Pirelli posted that the hardest tire each race starting next year will be called “hard,” and the softest, “soft.” The one in the middle will be “medium.”

They’ll also get corresponding colors for “hard,” “medium” and “soft,” rather than sticking to their original lineup colors like they have in the past. Hard will be white, medium will be yellow and soft will be red. The compounds that get those names and colors can change each race weekend, depending on which compounds are in the lineup.

Outside of the race weekends, the five compounds will get a naming system that numbers them “C1” through “C5,” with C1 being the hardest compound and C5 being the softest. If Pirelli changes or adds to the lineup in the coming seasons and keeps this structure, they’ll be slotted into the “C” naming system rather than given random and confusing, but also kind of cool, names like “hypersoft.”

The new naming system came with Pirelli’s announcement of the compounds for the first four races next season in Australia, Bahrain, China and Azerbaijan, which are in the tweet embedded above. Having that makes the naming system slightly easier to put in to practice.

In Australia, the C2 tire will be the “hard” compound, C3 will be the “medium” compound, and C4 will be the “soft” compound. Looking at that information in the form of a graphic, like it is to the left, makes it less confusing.

So, in sum, Pirelli threw out a bad tire-naming system that required graphical representation or memorization to understand, in favor of a new naming system that also requires graphical representation or memorization to understand.

Sigh. At least these are just tires, right?

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Fernando Alonso looks set to maintain a close relationship with McLaren despite calling an end to his Formula 1 career.

The two-time World Champion decided to wave goodbye to Formula 1 at the end of this season after growing increasingly disillusioned with the predictability of the sport.

But, all corners of the McLaren garage are eager to tap into his wealth of knowledge and experience in order to help with the development of the 2019 car.

McLaren’s 2019 driver line-up, Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris, are both particularly keen on his input.

“I think [his input] will be very valuable,” Norris said via Autosport.

“He’s got the best idea how the car’s changed over the years, the best experience of what’s good and what’s bad, a lot more than I do.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, if he’s still going to be part of much. He’s still part of McLaren. It’s up to him.

“It would be cool.

“Of course I would like to have as many days [in the car] as possible but if everyone comes to a decision and thinks it’s for the good of the whole team and his feedback will be just as important as mine or Carlos’s, then I think it’s a good thing.”

Sainz, who is a good friend of Alonso’s, would also welcome advice from his fellow compatriot.

“It’s something that for sure is in McLaren’s interests, or also Fernando’s interests to keep himself active,” added Sainz.

“It’s a decision more up to the management than to ourselves, but I wouldn’t see it with bad eyes.

“I would see it as a good thing to have a driver like Fernando comparing cars.”

McLaren CEO, Zak Brown, also still sees Alonso as a “very valuable asset” to have for the team to have at their disposal.

“I think you’ll see him around McLaren,” Brown told the official Formula 1 website.

“He remains part of the family, so I think where his influence comes in is helping our two drivers, he knows Carlos pretty well, he’s got to know Lando very well.

“I think there’ll be a big benefit of his experience there, and then with the engineers just helping us all work together and understand what’s next year’s car is doing, and the feedback from the drivers, what would Fernando do in a certain situation.

“I think that experience will be very valuable to us.”

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