Welcome to another round of news from the F1 world. The big story this week is the announcement from Honda that they will be acquiring the whole BAR team by the end of the year.

In an announcement made in Tokyo ahead of this weekend’s Japanese grand Prix, which also marks Honda’s 100th grand prix, Honda’s operating officer Hiroshi Oshima said “After discussing Honda’s future F1 participation, we have decided that Honda should own 100% of the team.” This means that Honda will join BMW, Renault, Toyota and Ferrari as the fifth fully-funded works operation in Formula 1. It is still not known what Honda intends to call the team next year, but BAT the current owners of the BAR team have confirmed its Lucky Strike brand will remain as title sponsor until the end of 2006.

In other news Kimi Raikkonen has promised to keep fighting hard in this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix to help McLaren win the constructors’ world championship. The Finn, who lost his battle with new champion Fernando Alonso for the drivers’ crown, said the defeat will not effect his desire to win in Suzuka. “The drivers’ title fight is over for this year and now we want to win the constructors,” Raikkonen said. An engine failure this morning though has meant that Kimi will have to suffer another 10 place penalty.

Tune in to next weeks grand prix show for a review of the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 8:54 pm and is filed under News, Grand Prix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.