ISTANBUL // Mark Webber conceded that the Turkish Grand Prix weekend has not been the smoothest of his season, but he was flawless when it mattered – and so was the Red Bull RB6.
For the seventh time in as many Formula One races in 2010, Adrian Newey’s aerodynamic masterpiece will start from pole position for today’s race.
Webber suffered an engine failure during Friday’s second free practice session, but the detonated Renault V8 was approaching the end of its expected life cycle.
He then sat out the opening part of yesterday morning’s session, because of a hydraulic problem, but a 1min 26.299secs lap gave him a fractional edge during the final moments of qualifying.
Lewis Hamilton got close at an open circuit that suits the McLaren-Mercedes much better than Monaco did, two weeks ago, but the bottom line is the Red Bull-Renaults were fully 14kph faster anything else through Turn Eight.
“We are losing about 0.4secs to them through there,” said Hamilton. The McLaren was fast enough to claw some of that back during the balance of the lap, but Hamilton’s best efforts still left him 0.138secs adrift.
“I was a slightly on the back foot when qualifying started,” said Webber, “but I knew I could get something from it if I dug deep. It was a very tight three-way fight until Seb had a problem ...”
That was a reference to teammate Sebastian Vettel, who is running a fresh chassis this weekend after the team discovered small cracks in the one raced in Monaco.
Vettel likes to name his cars – the last one was Luscious Liz, this one is Randy Mandy – but he was probably calling it something else yesterday afternoon.
The German had been quickest in Q1 and Q2, but then his brakes began locking. “It was very strange,” he said. “The car locked up going into Turn 12 on my first run, but that wasn’t really a problem. Then it happened again two corners later and I thought, ‘OK, maybe I braked a little late’, but then I got confirmation that there was a problem when it happened again at the start of my second run.
“To be honest, I feel quite lucky that I’m still third.”
Asked about the weight of expectation that accompanies a third consecutive pole position – and his fourth of the campaign, one more than Vettel – Webber said: “I’ve known worse pressure.
“Last year we clearly had a quick car, but it was a little bit snookered at some venues. This time we’ve been to lots of different tracks and it works well at all of them.”
For all Red Bull’s qualifying speed, their rivals tend to be a little bit closer in terms of race pace and Hamilton believes he can make a nuisance of himself today.
“I wasn’t 100 per cent happy with my car’s balance yesterday,” he said. “But everything feels good today and I couldn’t have asked for more from the lap. It feels great to split the Red Bulls, because they have been almost untouchable.
“I’m in a strong position. Overtaking is very difficult at this track, but it’s not impossible and I’ll be making life as hard as I can for Mark.”
McLaren have some new parts coming in the short term – but so, too, do Red Bull.
Yesterday the team tested their own version of McLaren’s pioneering aero vent, which stalls the rear wing on the straights, to increase top-end speed, but they have since discarded the system for the balance of the weekend.
“It worked OK,” said Webber, “but we came in to the weekend with our eyes wide open. It’s a tricky project to get right and fair play to McLaren, who got the jump. We’re not in a position to take risks. We never put stuff on the car if there’s a chance it might make it slower and we’re not going to start now.”
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100530/SPORT/705299911/1004
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Minister resigns in expense scandal
LONDON // David Laws, the chief secretary to the treasury and the man charged with tackling the UK’s record budget deficit, resigned yesterday after he admitted to receiving £40,000 (Dh210,000) in parliamentary expenses for renting a room in a house which was, in fact, owned by his partner.
The decision to quit was “his alone,” the BBC reported Mr Laws saying. He also said he had informed both the prime minister, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister.
“I do not see how I can carry out my crucial work on the budget and spending review while I have to deal with the private and public implications of recent allegations,” Mr Laws said.
MPs have been banned from claiming the taxpayer-funded allowances on homes owned by their partners since 2006. Yesterday, Mr Laws, a Liberal Democrat minister regarded as a rising political star, said he had done it not for personal gain but to conceal the fact he was gay.
That explanation seemed unlikely to wash as calls grew for his resignation earlier yesterday and as the parliamentary watchdog commission launched an inquiry into the affair.
Last year, British politics were rocked when The Daily Telegraph obtained hitherto secret files on MPs’ expenses claims. They showed that dozens had been fiddling the system and resulted in a record number of MPs standing down at the general election earlier this month, while three MPs, and a member of the House of Lords, are facing criminal prosecution.
now come back to haunt the fledgling, Conservative-led coalition.
Sir Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the committee on standards in public life, speaking before Mr Laws’ resignation, said it was “staggering” that the information had only just come to light.
“I’m genuinely shocked that somebody who is now chief secretary to the treasury is faced with disclosure of this nature where he clearly hasn’t told the full truth to the people dealing with expenses in the House of Commons,” he told the BBC.
“Given all the expenses farrago that has gone on over the past two or three years, the fact that it has come to light now when he is a key part of a coalition government is staggering really.
“How did this not come out in the [parliamentary expenses] inquiry? Or why, knowing that these matters were in the spotlight, didn’t he come forth himself?”
Mr Laws apologised for claiming up to £950 a month in expenses for five years to rent rooms in two properties in London owned by the lobbyist James Lundie.
MPs with constituencies outside London – as Mr Laws’ – are entitled to claim for weekday living allowances in the capital but not if they are “leasing accommodation from a partner”.
In a statement yesterday, Mr Laws said: “James and I are intensely private people. We made the decision to keep our relationship private and believed that was our right. Clearly that cannot now remain the case.
“My motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality.”
Mr Laws, a millionaire, is a former City banker whose main home is in his Yeovil constituency, has now referred the matter to the parliamentary standards commissioner – a move backed by Mr Cameron.
“At no point did I consider myself to be in breach of the rules which, in 2009, defined partner as ‘one of a couple who, although not married to each other or civil partners, are living together and treat each other as spouses’,” Mr Laws added.
“Although we were living together we did not treat each other as spouses – for example, we do not share bank accounts and indeed have separate social lives.”
Mr Laws said he will now pay back the money he claimed. “I regret this situation deeply, accept that I should not have claimed my expenses in this way and apologise fully.”
He was one of five Liberal Democrat cabinet members in the Conservative-dominated government.
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100530/FOREIGN/705299905/1002
Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig
WASHINGTON — Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.
The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.
The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.
On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.
“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”
The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards. The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options.
Though his report indicates that the company was aware of certain risks and that it made the exception, Mr. Hafle, testifying before a panel on Friday in Louisiana about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that the company had taken risks.
“Nobody believed there was going to be a safety issue,” Mr. Hafle told a six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials.
“All the risks had been addressed, all the concerns had been addressed, and we had a model that suggested if executed properly we would have a successful job,” he said.
Mr. Hafle, asked for comment by a reporter after his testimony Friday about the internal report, declined to answer questions.
BP’s concerns about the casing did not go away after Mr. Hafle’s 2009 report.
In April of this year, BP engineers concluded that the casing was “unlikely to be a successful cement job,” according to a document, referring to how the casing would be sealed to prevent gases from escaping up the well.
The document also says that the plan for casing the well is “unable to fulfill M.M.S. regulations,” referring to the Minerals Management Service.
A second version of the same document says “It is possible to obtain a successful cement job” and “It is possible to fulfill M.M.S. regulations.”
Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman, said the second document was produced after further testing had been done.
On Tuesday Congress released a memorandum with preliminary findings from BP’s internal investigation, which indicated that there were warning signs immediately before the explosion on April 20, including equipment readings suggesting that gas was bubbling into the well, a potential sign of an impending blowout.
A parade of witnesses at hearings last week told about bad decisions and cut corners in the days and hours before the explosion of the rig, but BP’s internal documents provide a clearer picture of when company and federal officials saw problems emerging.
In addition to focusing on the casing, investigators are also focusing on the blowout preventer, a fail-safe device that was supposed to slice through a drill pipe in a last-ditch effort to close off the well when the disaster struck. The blowout preventer did not work, which is one of the reasons oil has continued to spill into the gulf, though the reason it failed remains unclear.
Federal drilling records and well reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and BP’s internal documents, including more than 50,000 pages of company e-mail messages, inspection reports, engineering studies and other company records obtained by The Times from Congressional investigators, shed new light on the extent and timing of problems with the blowout preventer and the casing long before the explosion.
Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, declined to answer questions about the casings, the blowout preventer and regulators’ oversight of the rig because those matters are part of a continuing investigation.
The documents show that in March, after problems on the rig that included drilling mud falling into the formation, sudden gas releases known as “kicks” and a pipe falling into the well, BP officials informed federal regulators that they were struggling with a loss of “well control.”
On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.
“The most important thing at a time like this is to stop everything and get the operation under control,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin, offering his assessment about the documents.
He added that he was surprised that regulators and company officials did not commence a review of whether drilling should continue after the well was brought under control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html?hp
‘Top Kill’ Fails to Plug Leak; BP Readies Next Approach
HOUSTON — BP said Saturday that its latest attempt to stop the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was unsuccessful, and the effort, known as a “top kill,” was being scrapped in favor of yet another maneuver to stem the flow spreading into the waters.
The announcement marked the latest setback in the attempt to plug the spill that is polluting gulf waters at an estimated rate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. This is already the largest spill in U.S. history.
Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said the next step is called a “lower marine riser package cap” and involves sawing off the riser and placing a device atop it to capture the escaping oil. Equipment has already been deployed on land and on the sea bed, he said.
“We have made the decision to move on to the next option," Mr. Suttles said. “Repeated pumping, we don’t believe, will likely achieve success.”
The failure of the top kill procedure, which was thought to be the company’s best option for stopping the leak, was announced after about 30,000 barrels of mud was injected into the well and three attempts were made at what is termed the “junk shot,” a procedure that involves pumping odds and ends like plastic cubes, knotted rope, and golf balls into the blowout preventer, the five-story safety device atop the well.
Earlier in the day on Saturday, Mr. Suttles had said it was too soon to tell whether the top kill procedure was working, but had appeared doubtful that it was going to be the answer.
“I don’t think the amount of oil coming out has changed,” he said. If this latest attempt is unsuccessful, a relief well is the option experts say is most reliably going to stop the current catastrophe. But could take until August to drill a relief well.
“People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don’t know. It hasn’t been done at these depths and that’s why we’ve had multiple options working parallel.”
Mr. Suttles also used the press conference Saturday afternoon to defend BP’s clean-up efforts, which have come under fierce criticism from local politicians for being too little too late.
“We have been ramping up the activity every single day,” he said referring to the workers that are being brought in to mop up the rust-colored goo that is washing ashore along the coast here. “We and the Coast Guard are bringing in additional resources,” he said.
BP estimates it has nearly 2,000 workers already along the coast according to David Nicholas, BP spokesman. Mr. Suttles said the company was somewhat hampered in its efforts to be aggressive by the delicate nature of the ecosystem. “We don’t want to create more harm in doing the cleanup than the oil creates on its own,” he said.
Nevertheless, he added, BP was not only bringing in more people it was working on ways to get them to more inaccessible areas of the coast. He said they were going to start using tent cities and “flo-tels,” or floating hotels, to house workers closer to hard to reach marsh lands being covered with oil.
