Pat Symonds, Renault’s Director of Engineering, will be less involved in the race team in future, reports Autosport magazine. This has meant that there will a personnel reshuffle within the team, with Fisichella’s race engineer, Alan Permane, taking control of the teams overall engineering oversight and other engineers moving around to fill the gaps.

These are changes with the future in mind but they may have an immediate impact upon Renault’s competitiveness for 2007. It takes time to adjust to re-arrangements and, taken with the driver changes, especially the loss of Alonso, the team might not be as strong as we have come to expect, at least for the early part of the season.

The drivers are the biggest question mark, of course. I have been a fan of Fisichella’s over the years but, to be brutally honest, he has disappointed a little. There have been half chances for the taking but, generally, he has missed out on them. And this coming season with Renault has to be the make or break year. As the driver with experience, he should take the team forward and start to win consistently; others have risen to the occasion in the past and surprised us with suddenly-masterful performances (remember Patrick Tambay in Gilles’ shoes?). But can Giancarlo do it? I am not sure.

Then there’s young Heikki Kovalainen. Briatore thinks he has the makings of a star but only time will tell. His results in lower formulae are good but not record-breaking, and his year as a test driver with Renault tells us little. It seems he is pretty quick and he is Finnish, after all (and you know that counts!). But he would have to be something really special to challenge for the championship in his first F1 racing year. Again, I’m not sure.

With all these changes, the 2006 champions have to be a dubious bet for next year. And Ferrari are in the same boat, as strong as their line-up looks on paper. At McLaren, everything hinges on how good their car is – if it’s good, Alonso will be champion, if not, he’s in for a very frustrating year. And some are getting tired of waiting for McLaren to come good again…

It’s a perfect recipe for a fiercely competitive season. The big guys are busy rebuilding and the midfield runners have their acts together and are ready to take up the challenge. Ever the optimist, I hope we see a real dogfight between five or six teams with the championships not decided until the very last lap of the last race.

And I say that knowing full well that years of that sort are as rare as hen’s teeth in F1…

I love street circuits, even though we will probably never see them again in F1, apart from Monaco. They are impractical, dangerous and lack passing places, a sure combination to prevent their ever being tried again by the sport. But they are also atmospheric, dramatic, somehow produce good races, and enable the spectators to get closer to the sound and sight and smell of F1 cars than anywhere else.

Just the sound should be enough to convert anyone: experience this video of a Red Bull doing a demonstration run on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil – then tell me that the scream of that engine echoing off the buildings does not stir your blood. And the roads were drenched with rain – the driver was holding back!

My favorite of those street circuits that have gone is Long Beach. The sight of the cars streaming down to the hairpin after the start was one never to be forgotten. And there were always dramatic races at Long Beach; it was the one circuit where you could guarantee that uncompetitive cars suddenly came to the fore, where there were tussles between unlikely competitors and drivers in underpowered cars had a chance to make their mark.

Actually, that last statement is true of most street circuits. It was Detroit where John Watson earned his reputation as the only driver who could overtake on street circuits. And Detroit was a place where nobody could pass! Unfortunately, I could not find a decent picture of the circuit so you will just have to take my word for it that the photo of Senna up there was taken at Detroit.

Even the strange aberration of the circuit in a car park in Las Vegas gave us some great races. It was artificial and a poor excuse for a street circuit but it did let us get close to the action.

Notice that all these places are in the States. It was the only country that Bernie Ecclestone was so desperate to get into that he would accept such circuits. Now that seems to have changed (the money has moved elsewhere) and Bernie asserts boldly that F1 doesn’t really need a race in the USA at all.

So our chances of new street circuits coming along are non-existent. We must content ourselves with the annual and glorious experience that is Monaco – and fight tooth and nail to prevent it ever being taken off the calendar. It may be dangerous, cramped, outdated and whatever else its critics throw at it; but it is also the last reminder of a time when the public could experience F1 close up and the drivers had never heard of such a thing as safety.

It’s that man Senna in the lead again – but there’s something else interesting about this photo. Starting from the front, we have a McLaren, a Tyrrell (!), two Williams, a Benetton, a McLaren and two Ferraris. Then come a Jordan and another Benetton, but what are those two red cars behind them? They sure look like two more Ferraris to me.

Just to round it off, there are a Tyrrell, a March and a Minardi after that. But those red cars have me wondering. I suppose I could dig in the records and find out but I thought it might be more interesting to see if anyone has a better memory than I do – can you help me out?

Now that Michael Schumacher has retired, the discussions on whether he was the greatest driver ever have started. Some would doubt that he deserves to be amongst the truly great, others point at his record as incontestable proof of his superiority. There being little of note happening in the F1 world today, I thought it would be a good opportunity to take another look at the man who set the standard for the modern champion. Before we assert anything about Michael, we really need to remember Ayrton.

Let’s start with a short video that illustrates something any champion needs to be called “great” – character. Here is Senna’s reaction to Erik Comas’ nasty accident in a practice session. And then there’s dealing with adversity – as in Ayrton’s explanation of the facts of life to a young Michael Schumacher who has just taken him out of the race.

Everyone knows the story of the wet race at Donington in 1993 where Ayrton demonstrated how to drive in the wet – but do we remember how he struggled that year in a McLaren vastly inferior to the Benettons and Williams? Here is how a great champion does his utmost to hold faster cars back in such circumstances.

It is even true that greatness rubs off on others at times – if you could pass Ayrton, you made yourself an immediate reputation. Consider the case of Jean Alesi, whose passing manouver over Ayrton in Phoenix gave him a reputation for speed that was not to fade until his days with Ferrari. Everyone quickly forgot that Alesi was being lapped and really shouldn’t have been messing with the leaders at all.

Most of all, however, we want our champions to be human. Here is a tribute video to Ayrton in which he is caught laughing (yes, actually laughing!) on several occasions. The flag-waving is what got that form of celebration banned in the end, of course!

That was Ayrton Senna – Brazil’s finest but also F1′s, a fierce competitor and yet a man of character and compassion. In his day he was the fastest man on the track, even in cars that were less than the best. His record may not be as impressive as Schumacher’s but the statistics do not tell all. Enough said.

I see that the Imola authorities are going ahead with their plans to improve the circuit in spite of the San Marino GP being dropped from the calendar for 2007. The hope is to get the race back in 2008 but I cannot help but feel that it is a forlorn hope at best.

With Bernie Ecclestone trying to get the Silverstone organizers to agree to an alternating race with France (and, of course, the BRDC is not interested in such a plan), things look pretty bleak for Imola’s chances. There is a limit to the number of races that can be run each year (18 seems to be the maximum) and Far Eastern countries are lining up with money in their hands, desperate to get into the game. India is next to get a GP, in 2010 we’re told.

Simple mathematics indicates that, if you add a new race to the calendar, somewhere another has to be dropped. And it is Europe that suffers, inevitably, since it has by far the most races. No circuit in Europe can be confident that the ax will not visit at some time in the future.

Traditionalists (like me) can bemoan the loss of old and great circuits but the facts of modern life dictate that the oldest and best are the most likely to go. “Safety” is invariably the excuse to get rid of them because that is their greatness – they present a challenge to the driver and demand a higher level of skill to achieve good lap times.

But we all know that the real reason is money. It is costing the owners of older circuits millions to keep their tracks updated to the latest FIA specifications and this makes it almost impossible to balance the books. Already it costs a small fortune to go to watch a GP – in the future the gate fee will only increase. And that means many potential spectators will stay away – after all, they can see the race on television for a fraction of the cost. The resulting squeeze on the organizers’ finances gets worse as a result.

So how do the new circuits manage? The answer has to be that a GP is seen as a status symbol for the nation and the government helps with cash injections. Notice that half of the Turkish GP’s FIA fine this year was paid by the Turkish government – they want to retain their race because it has benefits beyond mere money; there is national pride to be considered.

In Europe, F1 has been around too long for its subsidiary benefits to be recognized by governments. It’s a case of familiarity breeds contempt. It would be hard, too, for a European government to justify huge expenditure on a GP to its constituents – too many of them could not care less about the sport.

So the spread of F1 to far corners of the earth will continue and fewer old circuits will be used in the future. But, just occasionally, the traditionalists get the last laugh – and here’s an item that made me smile:

F1 Racing-live reports that practice for the A1GP race in Beijing has had to be suspended because the cars just could not negotiate the hairpin. Total chaos ensued on the first lap, it seems. How ironic that all the money and hype has been insufficient to produce a circuit that cars can actually drive around…