BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Joie Chitwood has reaffirmed that the track wants F-1 to return.
“I know that Tony [George] has said it; I’ve said it: The door is open,” he said in an IMS press conference last week. “We think that’s a phenomenal racing series; we think it should be back in America.”
“Motorcycles didn’t replace F-1,” Chitwood added. “If you look at the way we scheduled our calendar, we had hoped that F-1 would come back and it would have maintained that June date after the Montreal event, and that’s why you saw the motorcycle event in September.”
The new motorcycle circuit at the Speedway has also been approved by the FIA for F-1, so the F-1 cars could use either that or a modified version of the original road track.

• All the teams except Super Aguri are testing this week at Spain’s Barcelona circuit.

• NSSN hears that the asking price for the Toro Rosso F-1 team is $125 million. That price reportedly could drop to $94 million if the new owners agree to continue to have Red Bull sponsorship on the cars for several years.

• Tickets for the European Grand Prix at the new street circuit in Valencia, Spain sold out in just 10 days. Spanish fans bought 60 percent of the tickets, which range in price from $305 to $755, while the other 40 percent were sold worldwide. The organizers are considering building more grandstands.

• The 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix reportedly will be held in October. It is not known if it will be the last race of the season.

• Felipe Massa’s win in Bahrain, his sixth career F-1 victory, was his first not starting from pole. It’s all relative, however, as polesitter Robert Kubica had too much wheel spin and lost the lead to Massa immediately.

• Last year, Mark Webber had to wait until the seventh race of the season before he earned his first points with a seventh-place in Indianapolis. With a pair of seventh places in the first three rounds of 2008, the Australian is off to a strong start.
“Points are going to be tough to get, and we realize that,” he said. “Those races are hopefully not few and far between, but we need to try and make a habit of doing that. There is a lot of opposition out there.”

• McLaren says that the reason Lewis Hamilton rammed into the back of Fernando Alonso in Bahrain was that Hamilton’s front wing had broken two seconds before the impact.

• Dirk de Beer, formerly head of aerodynamics at Renault, has replaced Dino Toso as director of aerodynamic technology. “Dino Toso remains an employee of the company and we cannot make any further comments on his position at the moment,” a Renault statement said.