JUNE 25, 2003

A flight of fancy

Congratulations must go the Agence France Presse for the most inventive story of the day. AFP has, with no help from the FIA, sent the whole of Belgium into a tail spin by announcing that the Belgian Grand Prix will be back on the F1 calendar in 2004. AFP's logic is that if there is a date at the end of August and 17 races on the calendar this must therefore mean that the Belgian race is back on again. That may happen but it is certainly not what was put in the FIA press release.

In addition to this the French newsagency has published what it thinks will be the entire F1 World Championship calendar. This is basically intelligent guesswork and may in fact prove to be correct but it should be noted that it is not based on any official documents as our sources say that if there was a calendar decided it would have been published by the FIA.