FOREST ROW, Great Britain — Can Renault close the gap on McLaren and Ferrari?
“We are a little bit too far behind them,” Fernando Alonso said. “At the moment, there is not any possibility to fight for podiums or wins, or things like that, so that is the first priority of these winter tests and the first race.
“To close the gap, and to be behind them two or three tenths is not such a big problem. But to be one second or eight tenths, like we are at the moment, is a little bit too much.”
Alonso acknowledges that Renault was not competitive last year.
“The team is very focused on changing this,” he said, “and they worked very hard on this new car to sort out the problems they had last year. I am here to help and to give my experience to them.”
Of course the other teams are all focused on improving as well, and all have the same number of hours to prepare for the Australian Grand Prix.
“We cannot work longer than the others,” Alonso said. “So we need to work better. We will see what we can do. We need to be clever and we need to do the right things to the car to improve it. That is the target for this February’s testing.”

• Bernie Ecclestone says that Australia may not get F-1 back after the current Grand Prix contract expires in 2010. The F-1 czar says other countries are lined up and offering a lot more cash than Melbourne to host a Grand Prix. But promoter Ron Walker is confident the race will remain.

• Honda continues its environmental theme “earthdreams” with the rear third of the car covered in an image of planet Earth. The front of the car, which features two 1960s style racing stripes, is white.

• Renault has invested heavily in a new Computational Fluid Dynamics facility that effectively does the same job as the wind tunnel but by using a very large computer instead. It will be running in mid-2008.

• Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello are feeling a lot more optimistic about the upcoming season than they were this time last year. The Honda RA108 may not be the quickest car out there, but it is not  “dire,” which is the way Honda CEO Nick Fry described the 2007 RA107.
“I did not come in after the first test,” Button said, “and say, ‘Wow! This car is really unpredictable,’ which is what I did last year.
“I came in and said, ‘This car feels like a proper racing car. We just need to work on it. It is not quick enough yet.’ And then they told me this is very basic, and that there will be a lot of changes before the first race.”

• The Spice Group, an Indian conglomerate, is looking into buying shares of the Super Aguri team.
The Times of India reported that Spice would pay $66 million to the cash-strapped team. But the catch is that Spice wants Narain Karthikeyan as a driver, and Honda is not too keen on that.

• Nelson Piquet, age 22, has dropped the “Junior” tag to his name. “I’m a grown-up now,” he said.

• BMW Sauber has named Christian Klien as its test and reserve driver and Marko Asmer as its second junior test driver.

• Honda’s young driver line-up this season will consist of Mike Conway and Luca Filippi.

• Max Mosley, age 67, says he will decide in October if he will run for a fourth and final term as president of the FIA, a post he has held since 1993.

• A number of teams tested last week with McLaren Mercedes, Red Bull Renault, Williams Toyota, Renault, BMW Sauber, Honda, Toro Rosso and Force India in action at Barcelona. All but the latter two teams, who have hybrid cars, ran 2008 cars.
Lewis Hamilton set the best time on day one in the McLaren, while Sebastian Vettel and Sebastien Bourdais were one/two on the second say with their Toro Rossos in qualifying trim. Mark Webber’s Red Bull was quickest on day three.
Williams’ program ended early after Kazuki Nakajima crashed. While he was unhurt, the team wanted to investigate the front-wing mounting failure before continuing testing.