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Tomorrow will see the publication of the official entry list for the FIA Formula 1 World Championship and there is much interest in whether or not this list will feature Super Aguri F1 as the 11th team. If the team is on the list of entries it must have convinced the powers-that-be that it is serious and can produce a chassis within the rules - whatever they may be. The fact that Scuderia Toro Rosso (nee Minardi) has been running around in Spain this week with a Red Bull RB1 chassis would seem to suggest that the Italian team may be using something similar in the months ahead because testing cars which are not going to be raced has only limited value for an engineering team which is working on a completely different car.
The word we hear is that the Toro Rosso chassis is not going to be a RB1 derivative but rather a development of the old Minardi concept but with more aerodynamic development than was available in the days before Red Bull cash was available. Sharing aerodynamic data is not allowed but it is almost impossible to police and there is at least one obvious example looking back a few years where a successful team provided another team with aerodynamic data which enabled it to win a race. The cars were different under the aerodynamic skin but their shapes were very similar.
We believe that Super Aguri F1 will be on the list and that it will probably start the year with updated (and crash-tested) 2002 Arrows chassis for the first three races and will then switch to a car of its own design for the start of the European season. BAR (or Honda Racing F1 as it will soon become) will not be supplying chassis as it seems that the Concorde Agreement states that even if one owns the intellectual property rights of a chassis, it must not have been designed or manufactured by an existing operation. The BAR name and ownership may have changed but the company number remains the same and the staff is not very different.
There may be other announcement tomorrow as contractual clauses may end at the end of November, allowing other moves to be made
grandprix.com
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