The Flying Lap

Peter's guests in studio are the Writer/Executive Producer of the new Senna movie, Manish Pandey, and the world's pre-eminent driver coach, Rob Wilson. And joining them live on Skype is Bruno Senna, Ayrton's nephew. The 2008 GP2 Championship runner-up, Bruno is fresh from his first F1 season with HRT-Cosworth. No guesses about the topic of discussion: three-times F1 World Champion, Ayrton Senna.

Peter's guests today include engineer Mark Preston of Formtech Composites, who has previously worked with McLaren (F1) and General Motors, and Todd McCandless, creator of one of the most prolifically-read formula one blogs on the internet, Formula1blog.com. Both Mark and Todd will be live on Skype to discuss what all fans want to learn about; the new 2011 technical regulations for F1.

Peter’s guest today is the 1960’s racing legend, Chris Amon, live from the Hampton Downs Motorsport Park in New Zealand. Starting from his first F1 race at the 1963 Monaco GP to his last in 1976 at the Canadian GP, Chris has spent time with numerous teams, including Ferrari, Matra, Tyrrell and McLaren. With a collection of photos as a guide, this will be a fantastic trip down memory lane.

We are very pleased to have Mark Webber as Peter’s guest today. As you all know, Mark is the Australian Red Bull driver who finished 3rd in the F1 2010 World Championships, closely behind his teammate Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso. Mark will be live via Skype and we’ll hear about his thoughts on this year’s upcoming season, and possibly, last year’s excitement.

Guests today include Spanish F1 driver Pedro de la Rosa, recently with Sauber in 2010 and fresh from his stint as Pirelli test driver, and Craig Scarborough, an expert in tech analysis in all things F1, as better explained through his ScarbsF1 blog. Today's topic will focus on the new cars just unveiled and the initial testing and what can be construed from both.

Peter’s guests today include, from Spain, John Booth, Marussia Virgin F1 Team Principal; from Abu Dhabi, new Aussie V8 Champion, and former Jaguar F1 test driver, James Courtney, live from Round 1 of the 2011 Aussie V8 Championship; and, joining us in studio is the creator of the ‘twin keel’ layout, Sergio Rinland, also a former Sauber and Benetton designer. We also take a more in-depth look at the launch of the new McLaren MP4-26 and discuss its fascinating technology.

Jonathan Neale, McLaren Racing Managing Director will be joining us live online directly from the McLaren Technology Centre. Our in-studio guest will be Keith Collantine. A follower of F1 for over 20 years, Keith set up the F1 Fanatic blog in 2005 and has been running it full time for more than 12 months. The discussion will centre around McLaren, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, and life with an F1 team, as Keith and Peter will surely have great input and insight on what is and has been going on in the formula one world.

Joining us in studio will be Karun Chandhok, set for a third driver role with Team Lotus and Anthony "Boyo" Hieatt, Team Principal of the Double-R F3 team.

We are thrilled to have Willem Toet online for today’s episode. Toet is an ex Benetton/Ferrari/BAR/Sauber engineer and current Managing Director of the RML Group. Joining us in our London studio, we welcome back Craig Scarborough, the F1 tech analyst expert, from the popular ScarbsF1 blog. With photos and drawings, we’ll delve into the final updates on testing and talk about how the teams will fare as they put in their final preparations for the upcoming 2011 season.

As the title indicates, today’s topic will be about the history, past and present, of the Williams F1 team. We expect to have very special guest Sir Frank Williams live online from the Williams factory. With a long history going back decades between Peter and Frank, there will not be a shortage of topics and stories to discuss. Add on the incredible accomplishments of 16 world championships and 113 races won since 1980, you can understand the outpouring of support and admiration for Sir Frank Williams and his team throughout the decades.

As tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, we would like to welcome two Irish legends to the show, Derek Daly and Maurice Hamilton. Now one of the most sought after International speakers, Derek was a professional race car driver for 17 years, racing in formula 1, Indy car and World Sports Cars. Maurice is an award-winning writer, author of 20 books, with the most recent on Sir Frank Williams and has attended over 500 F1 races as a working journalist. Together, we’ll hear great stories, great insight and possible theories on the luck of the Irish!

Today’s guests will be two prominent bloggers and one brilliant engineer. In our London studio will be Willem Toet, the current Managing Director of the RML Group and ex-Ferrari, Benetton, BAR and Sauber engineer. Joining him will be the Fanatic’s, Keith Collantine, whose blog has an impressive readership worldwide. Online and direct from the U.S.A. will be Formula1Blog’s Todd McCandless, one of the top F1 website’s in the U.S.A.. As an added bonus, we have a video interview with Red Bull’s Team Principal, Christian Horner! All three of our guests have been on the show before and we look forward to their second appearances. We are excited about discussing the upcoming 2011 season and Sunday’s first race, the Australian Grand Prix!

We’re looking forward to discussing the first F1 race of the season on Wednesday’s show. The AGP had no shortage of topics that will be looked into. We are pleased to have the F1 tech analyst from the blog ScarbsF1, Craig Scarborough, as the in-studio guest. Craig has appeared before and is a wealth of knowledge in all things technical.

Peter and special guests - Sally and Ed Swart, Rob Wilson, plus a recorded interview by Frank Matich - discuss the shining light that was double World Champion, Jim Clark. The 43rd anniversary of his death will be this Thursday, April 7th and we hope, with the addition of dozens of photos, that you will thoroughly enjoy this walk down memory lane.

Today's episode co-incides with the 80th birthday of that great American racing driver, Dan Gurney. Accordingly, we will be welcoming Dan, a 4-time F1 winner, onto the show live from the headquarters of All-American Racers in Santa Ana, California, mainly to say "Happy Birthday" but also to talk about machinery like the 1967 Eagle-Weslake - a car generally considered by F1 enthusiasts world-wide to be the most beautiful of all time - and Dan's amazing racing life. We'll also be looking back at the Malaysian Grand Prix and ahead to the UBS Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai with two other special guests - Sergio Rinland, the ex-Williams, ex-Sauber engineer who also worked for Dan Gurney, and Rob Wilson, the world's leading driver coach.

Brian Redman's mercurial F1 career in the late 1960's was followed quickly by staggering success in World Championship Sports Car racing. An anchorman for the legendary Gulf Ford GT40 and Porsche 917 teams, Brian has won on all types of circuit and in all conditions. He went on to dominate in F5000 and GT racing and thus to consolidate his position as one of the greatest racing drivers of his time. Todd McCandless of http://Formula1Blog.com and respected journalist and FIA Press Commission member Mike Doodson will join Peter in talking with Brian.

Guests include Todd McCandless, online from the U.S., creator of one of the most prolifically-read formula one blogs on the internet, Formula1blog.com; and in the studio, Mike Doodson, who has worked at the forefront of British motor racing journalism since the late 1960's. This episode will also include video post-race exclusive interviews with Phil Prew, Senior Race Engineer, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes and Adam Parr, CEO, AT&T Williams.

For this list, we've gathered viewer comments online, via Twitter and Facebook, with additional suggestions from Peter Windsor and today's special guests, Ian Titchmarsh & Jonathan Williams. As a race commentator and all-round expert, Ian Titchmarsh has been synonymous with motor racing, and British motor racing in particular, for over 40 years. He is an active member of the BRDC; he is the anchorman announcer for the British Grand Prix; and his legal, encyclopaedic mind makes him ideally-suited to evaluating the hundreds of talented drivers never to have raced in F1. The son of Sir Frank Williams, Jonathan Williams justifiably has a reputation for being one of the best talent-scouts in the motor racing business. He is an integral part of WilliamsF1, specialising in driver development and management, but he has also worked for Dallara and has close ties with the iSport GP2 team. It should be a fun day.

Two very special guests with join Peter in discussing the upcoming Turkish GP. Steve Hallam engineered Nigel Mansell at John Player Team Lotus before joining McLaren in 1991. Over the next 18 years he was a part of six World Championships - four Constructors' and two Drivers'. In a rare move for F1 engineers, Steve switched to NASCAR in 2009. He will be speaking to us from the North Carolina headquarters of Michael Waltrip Racing, where Steve is now Executive Vice-President for Competition. Joining Peter in the studio will be a very familiar guest to regular viewers and the author of the blog ScarbsF1, Craig Scarborough. Craig will be talking us through all the latest F1 technical developments to the background of more superb photographs from Sutton Images as well as his own, lucid drawings.

We are pleased to have Kenny Brack, the 1999 Indianapolis 500 winner in studio today to talk about the upcoming race on May 29th. The Swedes career has spanned many different series, including CART, Formula 3000 and the IRL Indy Car Series. After winning the IRL Championship in 1998 and Indy 500 in 1999, Brack switched to CART in 2000 and won the Rookie-of-the-Year title racing for Team Rahal. An unbelievable crash in Texas in 2003 almost cost him his life and took him 18 months to recover. After retiring from IndyCar in 2005, he returned at the 2009 ESPN X Games 15 and went on to win the Rally Gold Medal.

After the overtaking extravaganza in Istanbul 2 weeks ago, we'll turn our attention to this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix. Special online guest will be Otmar Szafnauer, COO Force India F1. Otmar was born in Romania, grew up in Detroit, Michigan and joined the Ford Motor Co with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1986. He returned to Europe, to the new British American Racing (BAR F1) operation, in 1998; he worked for Honda F1 out of the same facility as a Vice President. Creative and original - but above all a motor sports fan - Otmar is also responsible for one of the most widely-used F1 iPhone apps in the world today.

Senna Movie' director Asif Kapadia and writer Manish Pandey will join Peter in the studio today. With the UK release of the Ayrton Senna movie set for June 3rd and the Monaco Grand Prix set for May 30th, the timing could not be better to discuss the racing legend. We will also recap the Spanish Grand Prix and preview Monaco, as well as showing a special video inside the Shell Ferrari Laboratory in the paddock at the Spanish GP.

We are thrilled to have Scuderia Toro Rosso's Sebastien Buemi join us online today from Switzerland. Buemi took the F1 world by storm by driving from 16th to seventh in his Grand Prix debut (Melbourne, 2009) and since then has finished top-ten on a further ten occasions, culminating in an excellent race in last Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix (tenth from 16th on the grid). Born in Aigle, Switzerland, 23-year-old Sebastien made his name with some dramatic GP2 drives in adverse conditions. He led an F1 race for the first time in Canada, 2010, and has made it through to Q3 twice so far this year. In addition, returning to join us in the studio will be F1 Fanatic's Keith Collantine, fresh off his numerous Monaco updates from his well viewed blog. With drama, shunts, controversy and glamour, the 2011 Monaco Grand Prix was definitely one for the ages.

Joining us again in studio to discuss the race in Montreal will be Craig Scarborough, F1 tech analysis expert, whose blog ScarbsF1 is a favourite online destination. The episode will also include a chat with Mike Printup, President of Watkins Glen about the recent car swap there between Lewis Hamilton and Tony Stewart, and a short video of the event.

We are pleased to show an extended interview completed recently with AT&T Williams F1 Technical Director Sam Michael. In what could be considered an F1 state of address discussion, we talk about DRS, KERS, fuel loads, aerodynamics, brakes and much more. We will also focus on the 2011 season performances of the teams and drivers so far and see where we're headed before the August break.

Today, in-studio, we are pleased to welcome James Allen to the show. A prolific author, TV presenter and observer of all aspects of F1, James has been an integral part of the sport since the early 1990s. The son of former racing driver, Bill Allen, James is today at the forefront of the FOTA Fans' Forum. After the first Forum launched in Montreal earlier this month, James will monitor the next Forum in Woking, UK, tomorrow on June 30th. In addition, we will also delve into this past weekend's European Grand Prix in Valencia.

The 2011 F1 season has been all about the tyres, and we have just the person to discuss how that has been progressing. Paul Hembery, Director of Motorsport for Pirelli will join us in the studio today to talk about their first season in formula one, feedback they've received and how he sees the upcoming British GP from a tyre point-of-view.

The F1 circus moves to the Jewel of the Orient this weekend for the night race at Singapore. Bruno Senna, nephew of Ayrton, raced there last year for Hispania but in 2011 he returns with a much more competitive car - the Lotus-sponsored Renault R31. As we look ahead at this unique event, Bruno recalls his first two races for LRGP at Spa and Monza, where, under pressure to prove himself after nearly a year on the sidelines, he out-qualified his team-mate first time out and then scored his maiden World Championship points. A winner in F BMW, F3 and GP2, and now on the threshold of a successful F1 career, Bruno Senna not only displays the poise worthy of his name but also the talent and aggression of which is uncle would have been proud. We also take a detailed look at Singapore - at this spectacular street circuit and its data trends - with the expert guidance of Sean Kelly, the world's pre-eminent F1 statistician. A regular at Speed TV, Sean in addition supplies statistics and real-time information to 13 other TV networks around the world.

The SingTel Singapore GP was another Seb Vettel classic. Jenson Button set fastest lap towards the end of the race in his McLaren-Mercedes but Red Bull's World Champion otherwise stole all the stats. He won the pole, he quickly disappeared from the pack and he led every lap. Behind, other races-within-races were taking place. Jenson Button won the battle for second place and Mark Webber beat Fernando Alonso into the lower podium position. What was it like, though, for the drivers in less competitive cars? Timo Glock, lead driver for Marussia Virgin F1, joins us live from Germany to discuss his weekend in Singapore, his season to date - and the team's new technical partnership with McLaren. We also discuss technical developments with the excellent Craig Scarborough, a familiar face on The Flying Lap and an engineer-journalist respected the full length of the F1 pit-lane for his attention to detail, constant creativity and lucid descriptions of the complicated.

Although it was designed as long ago as 1962, Suzuka Circuit is today considered to be an all-time classic. And few drivers know it better than McLaren's Third Driver, Pedro de la Rosa. Between 1995 and 1997, Pedro won no fewer than 16 F3/F3000/GT races in Japan - many of them at Suzuka. In Episode 39 of The Flying Lap, we invite Pedro to talk us through the amazing Suzuka lap in fine detail and to capture the magic that is racing in Japan. We'll also be discussing the current status of Vodafone McLaren Mercedes as Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button take on the might of Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.

We are very happy to be joined today in our London studio with 1979 F1 World Champion Jody Scheckter. Back in the early 1970's, Scheckter jumped into the motor racing scene by dominating Formula Ford and F3 and then running at the front in F5000, CanAm and Formula One. After securing 10 F1 wins during his time at McLaren, Tyrrell and Wolf, Scheckter reached the pinnacle of the sport when he won the 1979 World Championship for Ferrari. For the Italian team, it would take Michael Schumacher and 21 years to get back to the top of the racing world. Today, the England based South African is one of the most recognized organic farming experts in the world. In addition, Peter will also recap the DHL Turkish Grand Prix with commentary and by answering questions submitted by the viewing audience.

With the 2011 F1 season finally at an end, we talk live in the studio with the 1996 World Champion, Damon Hill. The son of Graham Hill, OBE, the double World Champion who also won the Indy 500 and the Le Mans 24 Hours, Damon began his motor racing career relatively late and far from Prevailing Wisdom. Eschewing karts, Damon excelled on motor bikes before switching to Formula Ford and then Formula 3. It took a while for the establishment to recognize Damon as a great talent in his own right but the chance came with Sir Frank Williams in 1993, when Damon parlayed a Williams test contract into a full-time race drive. He was instantly on the pace of his esteemed team-mate, Alain Prost, and that year not only won his first Grand Prix but also the two that followed, giving him an amazing, opening hat-trick. Damon helped to steer the Rothmans Williams Renault team through the loss of Ayrton Senna in 1994 and thereafter fought closely with Michael Schumacher's Benetton, culminating in the infamy of Adelaide, 1994, when Schumacher drove into Hill when the World Championship was at stake. Damon received full payback in 1996, when he not only started every race from the front row but also won eight Grands Prix and the World Championship. Damon should have won in Hungary for Arrows in 1997 but did score one final victory for Jordan - in the wet at Spa, 1998, giving him a total of 22 wins, 20 poles and 19 fastest laps. Now recently retired as President of the British Racing Drivers' Club (BRDC), and from playing a pivotal role in the status of Silverstone as the British GP venue, Damon is now actively behind the career of the third generation of Racing Hills - his son, Josh. Fast in Formula Ford and Formula Renault, Josh, like Damon in the late 1980s, is at that time in his career when nothing is certain but everything seems there for the taking.