MARCH 17, 2005

Monteiro's drive not in danger

Tiago Monteiro will be staying at Jordan for the time being, following the arrival of a payment from his backers. The Portuguese driver had been facing rumours that he would be replaced by Dutchman Robert Doornbos if the money did not arrive before the Malaysian GP.

Tiago Monteiro will be staying at Jordan for the time being, following the arrival of a payment from his backers. The Portuguese driver had been facing rumours that he would be replaced by Dutchman Robert Doornbos if the money did not arrive before the Malaysian GP. The odd thing about this is that all the talk about large sums of money from the Midland organisation do not seem to have been backed up with much hard cash. This may be because of the plan to get through this season and then kick off the new Midland F1-branded team in 2006. This is all well and good if Dallara is able to produce a competitive F1 car without affecting its other businesses and as long as the team retains enough good people to run the cars, which seem likely to have Ferrari engines. One of the problems facing the new management is that having proclaimed the plan to have the cars designed and built in Italy, there is little motivation for the designers who work in England to stay on and the Jordan staff may dwindle as the year goes on. We hear that a number of Jordan people are currently moving to the new teams being created for the new A1 Grand Prix series.

It is worth noting that we have also had several reports that seem to indicate that the new management at Jordan is not doing very well when it comes to F1 politics. We hear that several other team bosses already unhappy with the ambitious Dr Colin Kolles, who seems to have decided to enter F1 with bravado rather than accepting that he and his colleagues might not know all the answers at this early stage of their F1 careers.