Auto News 5

It took a while, but Lotus F1 Team paid Kimi Raikkonen his salary for the 2012 and 2013 seasons.

According to El Mundo Deportivo, the Finn's average salary for those two seasons was around $7 million. But the team also owed him some $35 million in bonuses.

Having signed for Ferrari at the end of 2013, Raikkonen skipped the last two races that year. He mentioned a back surgery, but some believed he was simply fed up with the delays.

Kimi Raikkonen, Lotus E21 (Photo: WRI2)

Now much better off financially, Lotus finished paying the 2007 world champion's earnings, and all is well according to nextgen-auto.com.

"The situation with the creditors is much better compared to last year," confirmed Lotus' executive director Matthew Carter.

"(Raikkonen's salary) was a big part of our debt, but it has been paid in full by now."

From Formula1.com

Reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton had to wait six long years between his two titles. But it was all worth it apparently.

The gap actually equals the second longest such period in F1 history. Niki Lauda holds the record: he clinched his third drivers' crown in 1984, some seven years after his second championship triumph.

Niki Lauda, 1984 world champion (Photo: WRI2)

Hamilton became Mercedes' first F1 champion since Juan Manuel Fangio in 1955, and the first British multiple champion since Jackie Stewart in 1971. He also moved on to 33 Grand Prix triumphs, overhauling previous British record holder Nigel Mansell's long-standing tally.

Of course, he also put his mark on the 2014 season. For example, he won more races (11), led more laps (495), and finished on the podium more often (16) than anybody else. And he holds the biggest (30.135s) and smallest (0.636s) winning margins of the season.

From GMM

Marussia seems to be in the final throes of collapse, but things are actually looking up.

The backmarker team sat out the US-Brazil double header in November amid financial troubles, and according to F1 business journalist Christian Sylt, administrators sold nearly 1000 items in an auction last week to pay creditors.

But Bernie Ecclestone says that if the team can sort out its problems, he will release to it the prize money for finishing the 2014 season in ninth place, said to be more than $50 million.

"If Marussia can find somebody who can prove they have enough money to run for the whole year, and we agree they are right, we would leave things as they are," the F1 supremo told The Independent.

Marussia is collapsing under the ownership of Andrey Cheglakov, who Ecclestone said is a "nice guy".

There is good news around the corner for Marussia (Photo: WRI2)

Rather, the 84-year-old blames the team's management.

"He was badly advised and got into the team without really knowing too much about it," he said.

"I think if he had had somebody with him that could do a little bit more, he would still be in formula one today," Ecclestone told Russia's Ria Novosti news agency.

The other backmarker facing collapse is Caterham, who also missed the US-Brazil double header but returned for the Abu Dhabi finale thanks to a desperate round of controversial online crowdfunding.

Sylt revealed in the Sunday Express newspaper that a crunch meeting is taking place on Monday, in which unpaid creditors will be asked to approve a potential sale of the team.

Caterham's chances of surviving may be better than Marussia's because it managed to make it to Abu Dhabi for the 2014 finale, even though the crowdfunding scheme was controversial and blue-chip sponsors were replaced by tiny backers like a local pub paying less than $8000 for its logo.

"It laid bare the margins made on F1 sponsorship," Sylt wrote in the Telegraph, "but it kept the team's wheels turning."

Caterham's administrator, Finbarr O'Connell, said the fact Caterham raced in Abu Dhabi justified the way the money was raised.

"Having concluded a successful race event," he told the Sunday Express, "the administrators have continued to have encouraging discussions with several potential buyers, a process that is still ongoing."

Opel CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann has warned top managers that the General Motors unit's 2016 profit target is under threat from economic setbacks, according to a German daily paper.

Opel CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann has warned top managers that the General Motors unit's 2016 profit target is under threat from economic setbacks, according to a German daily paper.

Sketches of two mysterious cars, one obviously a retro design, and the other a modern one, appear on a Christmas card sent to just-auto.com.

Automobile recalls surpassed the 60 million mark in the United States for the first time in a single year, largely because of the rush to prevent more deaths from defective General Motors ignition switches and Takata airbags.

AvtoVAZ blamed supplier problems for Ladas failure to have the No. 1-selling car in Russia last month after the Kia Rio outsold the Lada Granta.

The second-generation Chevrolet Volt will have the driver-controlled battery regeneration system used in the Cadillac ELR.

Suppliers, regulators, automakers and consumers are struggling to understand the scope and implications of a defect in Takata airbags that has led to recalls of millions of vehicles.

Russia's AvtoVAZ says supplier problems -- not declining demand -- are to blame for its Lada brand's failure to have the No. 1-selling car in the country last month.

Suppliers, regulators, automakers and consumers are struggling to understand the scope and implications of a defect in Takata airbags that has led to recalls of millions of vehicles.

Social media is used for more than just keeping up with friends. It's also being used to find people who have defaulted on their auto loans.

Without giving out too many details, Robert Kubica confirmed his plans to take part in the Monte-Carlo Rally.

"We sent an entry for the Rallye Monte-Carlo today," he wrote on his Facebook page Friday, as registration for the WRC season-opener closed. "See you on the stages!"

An announcement regarding the rest of the Pole's plan for 2015 is expected next week. But apparently, Kubica, who considered going back to road racing, will be back in the WRC at the wheel of a Ford Fiesta RS.

According the British magazine Autosport, Kubica is either going to return with M-Sport, or go to A-Style, the Italian team that recently helped him win the Monza Rally Show and Bettega Memorial Rallysprint.

Kubica at the Bettega Memorial Rallysprint (Photo: Facebook)

It appears Multimatic Motorsports, a Canadian company, will be instrumental in Ford's anticipated return to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in 2016.

Autoweek revelead earlier this week that the Detroit manufacturer was working on a factory-backed program to race in the United SportsCar championship and at La Sarthe, where Ford has not won outright since 1969.

This racing effort would involve the new GT-successor Ford will unveil at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, next month.

Even though the official announcement regarding the racing plans is expected only in a few months, Autoweek claims the cars are to be run by Ganassi Racing, which currently races EcoBoost-powered Riley prototypes in the USC, and built by Multimatic Motorsports.

Le Mans (Photo: WRI2)

Based in Markham, Ontario, Multimatic has been involved in many important automotive projects over the years. It's motorsport division has even won Le Mans before, in the LMP675 division.

The racing relationship between Multimatic and Ford dates back to 1992, a season during which Toronto native Scott Maxwell took top honours in the Firestone Firehawk national endurance sports class championship, behind the wheel of a Ford Taurus.

From GMM

Bernie Ecclestone has confirmed reports he remains determined to shake up F1's engine rules.

We reported that, at Thursday's Strategy Group meeting in Geneva, the F1 supremo did propose to scrap the turbo V6 regulations for 2016 but it did not produce a "definitive result".

But according to Germany's Auto Motor und Sport, he made clear his strong desire for 'louder, more powerful and cheaper' engines for 2016, perhaps to be normally aspirated, 1000 horsepower and costing just 10 million euros for a customer supply.

"An expert group must deliver results (on the proposal) by the end of January," claimed correspondent Michael Schmidt.

Ecclestone made clear his strong desire for louder, more powerful and cheaper engines for 2016 (Photo: WRI2)

But Ecclestone told The Independent newspaper late on Friday that at the meeting, in emerged that in fact "Nobody wants to change the engines, they are all happy".

"It's not exactly great progress," he is quoted by F1 business journalist Christian Sylt.

"The next step is that we will have another meeting in January and the teams will have to come back with something positive. If they don't, we will say this is how it has got to be," Ecclestone added.

From WRC.com

Rally Sweden organizers asking fans to commemorate the life of 1979 world champion Bjorn Waldegard and help raise money for cancer research.

Waldegard, the first man to win the drivers' championship, died on 29 August this year. He was 70. The Swede, who won 16 WRC events during his career, had been receiving treatment for cancer when his condition deteriorated.

Now the team behind Waldegard's home rally are inviting people to celebrate his memory by lighting a virtual star for him at thestar.se.

So far almost 3,000 have been lit by fans from around the globe -- and for every star lit Rally Sweden will donate 1 Swedish Krona to the Swedish Cancerfonden charity.

The various issues that slowed down the first two outings of the new Honda power unit will no longer be a problem, according to McLaren boss, Eric Boullier.

Test driver Stoffel Vandoorne only managed a handful of laps over the two days of the Abu Dhabi post-season tests, aboard an interim MP4-29. But after a thorough investigation, most of the teething problems have been solved, Boullier says.

"We changed a little bit the schedule and we sent Honda, McLaren people and the car itself back here [to Woking] for full investigations," the Frenchman is quoted as saying by Sky Sports.

Stoffel Vandoorne did get to drive much in Abu Dhabi (Photo: WRI2)

"They worked very hard for a week and they found out everything. A recovery plan is in place. Part of it has already been fixed, so there are now some further tests on dynos to validate."

Boullier says the problems did not affect one particular area of the car. It was just a general issue with the hardware: "It was not only one problem. There were hardware issues which obviously made the wrong software code.

"So then we had to first find out what was wrong in the hardware system to fix the software system."

From GMM

Daniel Ricciardo's surprising pace was "probably a factor" in the decision taken by Sebastian Vettel to leave Red Bull.

That is the claim of team boss Christian Horner, who admitted it is "weird" to see the quadruple world champion already wearing Ferrari red after so much success with the premier energy drink-owned team.

German Vettel caught everyone by surprise in early October when he announced he was leaving Red Bull.

But it was already known that the 27-year-old, wearing the number 1 on his car for the fourth season in a row, was no fan of the new turbo V6 formula.

"He didn't like what F1 had become and was quite vocal about it -- didn't like the engines, the noise, the way the car felt," Horner told the British broadcaster BBC's season review.

Sebastian Vettel had to play second fiddle to Daniel Ricciardo in 2014 (Photo: WRI2)

The Briton said it was "Seb and Kimi (Raikkonen)" -- now to be Ferrari's race pairing for 2015 -- that suffered the most with the radical new regulations.

"He (Vettel) got very frustrated the car wasn't doing what he wanted it to do and of course to compound that his teammate is winning a couple of races and performing at the level he was."

Vettel's teammate, of course, was Australian Ricciardo, stepping up from Toro Rosso and surprising F1, Red Bull and even himself with his stellar form.

Ultimately, Ricciardo won three grands prix compared to Vettel's none in 2014, and finished the drivers' title behind only the dominant Mercedes duo.

Horner thinks Ricciardo's shock form was "probably a factor" in Vettel's decision to move, with a "defining moment" coming at Monza where the German was audaciously overtaken by his teammate.

"He was enormously frustrated after that grand prix," said Horner.

"It was at a time where, knowing Sebastian as well as I do, I could see he was very distracted and it was obvious something was at the back of his mind," he added, referring to the advanced negotiations with Ferrari.

"By the time he got to Singapore you could see he was a different person," Horner said. "So, no, it wasn't a great surprise in the end."

FCA US said today it will replace driver-side airbag inflators in as many as 3.3 million more older-model vehicles, in a capitulation to a demand by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.