Glenn Freeman

surviving in F1 but yeah a shame really that just F1 had moved on from being able to do that sort of thing I think but let's get back to what was actually going on in F1 then and a team that was a little disappointed with how they were getting on was Mercedes

This was the first year of the Silver Arrows being back on the grid, having bought Braun over the winter.

But Nico Rosberg said the team's struggles were difficult to explain.

He said that although Mercedes was bringing a lot of developments and making some progress, he felt it was clear it wasn't enough progress.

Mercedes motorsport boss Norbert Haug admitted he had hoped for more and that Mercedes wanted to be winning, but it needed to be patient because all the ingredients are there.

Haug said Mercedes was a good team that was composed and concentrated, but we need a lot more speed.

John, do you think by this point it was starting to dawn on Mercedes that this F1 comeback wasn't going to be as straightforward as perhaps they were hoping when they brought Braun off the back of Braun winning a championship?

And a lot more investment as well.

It was, you know, I think the phrase you always use, Ed, is, you know, Mercedes thought they were getting a turnkey world championship winning operation.

But as you've outlined there, John, it wasn't quite like that.

I always like to say that car wasn't the Mercedes W01.

It was the Braun BGP 002, really a very underdeveloped.

Now let's move on to what I found a really surprising piece of news during the Turkey weekend when I went back and researched this.

And this was around F1's imminent deal that was about to be signed with Pirelli to take over from Bridgestone as F1's tyre supplier.

But over the Turkey weekend, we learned that Michelin was making a last minute bid to scupper the deal.

Senior figures from Michelin arrived in Turkey for meetings with the F1 teams, with the talk being that Michelin would make an improved offer in the hope of becoming F1's next tyre supplier.

Pirelli's offer was believed to be €500,000 cheaper per team than Michelin's, although McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh claimed that Michelin changed its offer at the last minute.

Michelin later denied that was the case.

Michelin said its late swoop to get back into F1 was simply a case of making sure teams had fully understood the details of our offer.

It said it had values it wanted to respect, and that meant being able to demonstrate the technical capability of our product through open competition.