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The FIA says that it has come to an agreement with Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds which puts an end to any more proceedings resulting out of the 2008 Singapore GP affair.

In a statement shrouded in legal language the FIA insists that it has come out on top, and that both men have admitted their share of responsibility.

However, the bottom line is that Briatore’s original ‘lifetime ban’ has become somewhat less restrictive, as the statement says that he has now agreed to ‘abstain from having any operational role’ in F1 only until the end of 2012.

The same deadline now applies to Symonds, who was originally banned for five years. Both men can in fact become involved in other forms of FIA-regulated motor sport from the end of 2011.

In return the FIA has ended the appeal process it had started against the decision taken in January by France’s Tribunal de Grande Instance, which found against the WMSC’s decision.

It remains to be seen whether Briatore is interested in returning to sport in 2013, but clearly he still has friends in high places and could yet find a future role.

The full statement reads as follows: “The decision handed down by the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris on 5 January 2010 at the request of Mr Flavio Briatore and Mr Pat Symonds, which the FIA has appealed, revealed a poor understanding of how the disciplinary procedure before the World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) works.

“In accordance with the undertakings made by the FIA President during his campaign, it will be proposed at the next General Assembly, at the end of 2010, that a structural reform, on which the FIA Statutes Review Commission is currently working, be adopted to prevent other misunderstandings.

“In the meantime, at its meeting in Bahrain on 11 March 2010, the WMSC decided on the one hand to adopt a Code of Practice to clarify the working of its disciplinary procedure, and on the other hand to give the FIA President full authority to seek a definitive outcome, whether judicial or extrajudicial, to the disputes with Mr Flavio Briatore and Mr Pat Symonds, best preserving the interests of the FIA.

“After discussions between their lawyers and those of the FIA, Mr Flavio Briatore and Mr Pat Symonds have each made a settlement offer to the FIA President with a view to putting an immediate end to the legal proceedings.

“Each of them recognising his share of responsibility for the deliberate crash involving the driver Nelson Piquet Junior at the 2008 Grand Prix of Singapore, as “Team Principal” of Renault F1 where Mr Flavio Briatore is concerned, they have expressed their regrets and presented their apologies to the FIA.

“They have undertaken to abstain from having any operational role in Formula One until 31 December 2012, as well as in all the other competitions registered on the FIA calendars until the end of the 2011 sporting season.

“They have also abandoned all publicity and financial measures resulting from the judgment of 5 January 2010, as well as any further action against the FIA on the subject of this affair.

“In return, they have asked the FIA to abandon the ongoing appeal procedure, but without the FIA recognising the validity of the criticisms levelled against the WMSC’s decision of 21 September 2009, as well as to waive the right to bring any new proceedings against them on the subject of this affair.

“Considering that the judgment of 5 January 2010 concerned only the form and not the substance of the WMSC’s decision of 21 September 2009, and that the undertakings and renunciation of all claims  expressed by Mr Flavio Briatore and Mr Pat Symonds are in line with what the WMSC is seeking, the FIA President has considered that it is in the best interests of the FIA not to allow the perpetuation of these legal disputes, which have received a great deal of media coverage and which, regardless of the outcome, are very prejudicial to the image of the FIA and of motor sport, and thus to accept this settlement solution, thereby putting an end to this affair.”

Will McLaren close the gap to Red Bull in qualifying in China? That’s certainly the hope of team boss Martin Whitmarsh.

The consensus in the pitlane is that RBR’s qualifying pace stems in part from its apparent ability to run its cars low with no fuel in qualifying and yet still retain a competitive ride height when a full fuel load goes in for the race, despite the rules saying that car settings cannot be changed.

Although he didn’t divulge any details, Whitmarsh says that suspension modifications are in hand that will address that situation at McLaren.

“I think they were very much in a class of their own,” he said of RBR’s pace. “We’re a lot closer now. Their qualifying pace has been very good, we think we know why, and I think that’s something that others will be doing shortly.

“We have some new parts coming for China which will lift us by more than a few tenths. We had six modifications here which were worth 0.3s, and if we can deliver more than 0.3s going to China I think it will be a pretty good effort. And particularly in qualifying.”

Whitmarsh says he has confidence in McLaren’s R&D programme: “I think one of the nice things about it, I sense, to be honest at the beginning of last year we were a long way behind and a little bit lost in terms of the correlation between our tools and what happened on the track.

“This year we’ve got a good hit rate, a good correlation between the tools, therefore if we find something is quicker in analysis and simulation, then it is when we put it on the car. I think we’ve got reasonable momentum at the moment. Who knows? You could come to the next race and someone’s ‘Hallelujah,’ and they take half a second or one second. But I think we’ll be competitive in China.”

Meanwhile Whitmarsh says that Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton were allowed to race each other in Malaysia, where both drivers ran very different strategies. Button started on the soft option tyre and made an early stop prior to a long stint on primes, while Hamilton did the opposite. Their races converged when Hamilton came out of the pits and just beat his team mate in a fraught run around the first turn.

“I was asked by both sides can we race? And I said yes is the answer. Jenson was told to push like hell, because he was going to be racing someone out of the pits, and that was clearly on the radio, and Lewis was told you’re racing Jenson out of the pits.

“We could see that was going to happen, and that’s what we chose to do. Both drivers wanted to beat each other, and it was close. I think as it happened they came out together and Lewis got ahead, in fairness Lewis was on much newer rubber so if he’d popped out behind, he would have been able to get past.”

Whitmarsh says that the decision to split the strategies of the two drivers was a sensible one.

“The view was we thought there would be some rain, there has been every afternoon since we got here. We thought that being on the same strategy as the 20 or 19 cars in front wasn’t likely to get us anywhere. Lewis wanted to go prime and go long, and he was happy with that, and that meant that had we had rain two-thirds of the way through – preferably when Lewis had got through to second place – bingo, we would have looked a genius wouldn’t we?

“It was a reasonable punt, and in any case his pace through the middle part of that race got him through to a solid points finish. With Jenson as soon as we could see he was held, after nine laps because he was on option he had the ability to stop. If he had been on primes he would have had to have sat there, because we couldn’t have pulled him in on a one stop and had the option last.

“I think both guys did a great job to come through to solid points. I think it was probably the right strategy for both of them, and as I say to have done what others were doing, the general strategy, wasn’t really going to do much for us.”

After what was on the face of it a disastrous weekend Ferrari came away from Sepang leading both World Championships.  But that’s of little comfort to team principal Stefano Domenicali, who says the team has to work hard to catch Red Bull.

Both drivers were stranded at the back of the grid after misjudging the rain in qualifying, and in while Felipe Massa finished seventh, Fernando Alonso retired with an engine failure.

That remains a major cause of concern, not least because Sauber suffered a double Ferrari failure on Sunday as well.

“First of all for sure when we have a problem of reliability, it’s a worry,” said Domencali after the flag. “We need to make sure that we solve it as soon as possible. We don’t know exactly what is the nature of the problem on Fernando’s engine at the moment, we don’t know exactly what is the situation on the Sauber engines too, but what I can say now as far as the information I have, these problems are different.

“This is in a way something that will add to the fact that we need to make sure that we are on top of the problems on the engine side. More than that at the moment it’s difficult to say.”

Alonso’s day was made even tougher by a gearbox downshift problem that hampered him for much of the race.

“I think he was really good to manage it. We had a problem with the downshift, [what it is] exactly we need to analyse the data. He was able to cope with a system that was not really working properly, so I think he was really good.”

Domenicali says Red Bull remains a step ahead for the time being.

“Who is the fastest car after the first three Grands Prix? If I have to look from the number point of view, we are leading the championships. So we should be the fastest. We know that is a very optimistic approach, and that is not the way that we think. We think that for sure looking at the result of the first three Grand Prix, Red Bull did three pole positions. They had reliability issues on other occasions, so for sure Red Bull seems to be the most competitive car.

“But I don’t want to forget that also McLaren seems very good. For sure that’s the ranking that I see if I have to freeze the situation today. But we are there, we are competitive, we are strong, and we need to make sure we are on top of the problems.”

Domenicali admitted that the team will also have to take a long look at its failure to get its qualifying strategy right in Saturday’s rain.

Unfortunately this weekend was the worst weekend in terms of a global result, mainly for two main factors – reliability, that was unfortunately not good enough, but we cannot forget unfortunately that the bad result of this weekend is mainly related to the qualifying of yesterday, because when you start from 19th and 21st, to be there is already a miracle. And for sure what has happened yesterday was not acceptable.

“We’re discussing it within the team, we don’t have to take any risks even if the bigger team have done the same. It’s not good, I think it’s a lesson learned for the group of people. But for sure I think that we need to keep working very, very strongly on the development of the car, because I’m expecting the others to do some new step.

“We have a competitive package, but it’s never enough, so we need to make sure that when we bring the new parts to the track, they will be reliable, and the data should be confirmed 100%, because when there is no testing you need to avoid analyses or simulations that are showing to you that you have good numbers, and then you discover at the track that it’s different, so I think that’s the approach that we need to keep for the next race.”

One of the developments the team is working on is a version of the McLaren ‘F-Duct,’ which will give Ferrari a straightline speed boost.

“On the system of McLaren, for sure we are working flat out at home, because we saw the benefit that seems to be very, very big above all in the main straight with certain conditions, I would say stalling of the rear wing. But we will bring as soon as everything will be reliable, and we will be 100% sure that the system will work.”

Jenson Button will start the Malaysian GP from 17^th place after spinning off into the gravel in qualifying. He finished the first session in 13^th, but he was unable to start Q2 due to his incident.

It was a dramatic first session that saw all the top teams display a little too much faith in the numbers rather than their senses as they kept their guys in the garage.

“We thought it wasn’t going to rain again,” said a frustrated Button. “We didn’t want to risk going out early, when you can aquaplane, so we waited in the garage, which is obviously the wrong thing to do now, in hindsight, but it’s a risk we took. In reality we didn’t think it was a risk. It’s disappointing. I ended up in the gravel, and obviously Lewis didn’t get through.

The only good news for Button is that he is ahead of both Ferraris and his own team mate.

“The negatives are that I am a long way back on the grid compared to the Red Bulls and the Mercedes, but I am in front of three of my rivals. It just proves that we made the wrong call, really. You make the right one sometimes, you make the wrong ones other times, so we’ve just got to hope the positives outweigh the negatives.

“We can make a good race from where we are. It’s exactly what F1 wants! It’s frustrating, and when you’re sat in the gravel and everyone is driving round, that’s the worst feeling ever. But it turned out OK for me, I was lucky that I got a lap in really, when other people were struggling with the conditions. It could be worse…”

Red Bull Racing’s reliability problems continued when Mark Webber suffered an engine failure the Friday afternoon session in Sepang.

The Aussie slid into gravel trap when the problem occurred at the end of a straight. Although the engine was not a fresh one, the failure has added to the team’s woes. This year drivers have to do 19 weekends with the same eight engine allowance that they had for 17 events in 2009.

“You never want your Fridays disturbed and it cost us a lot of track time, obviously,” he said. “But the car felt pretty good. Never ideal to lose an engine, but we did. It was pretty high mileage. But you want every km you can get, no question about it.”

Webber’s team mate Sebastian Vettel was second in the afternoon session, which gave the team some encouragement.

“It’s where we expected to be. It would have been nice to feel the options and have a go on them, but I’ll have to do that tomorrow.

“The car feels good in the quick stuff. I wouldn’t say we have a particular weakness for a speed range, in terms of low and high speed. We’re good in the low speed too.”

Fernando Alonso says his focus is totally on gathering points for his World Championship campaign. In Australia the Spaniard recovered brilliantly from his first corner mishap to claim fourth place, keeping his cool despite pressure from Lewis Hamilton.

Afterwards he pointed out that he was happy because sometimes a win could only gain you seven points on a title rival, and on this occasion, he’d got 12 more than Sebastian Vettel.

“I was not ready to attack even if I wanted,” he said in Sepang on Thursday, “because I finished completely my tyres to push very hard to arrive to the group, so there was very little chance to overtake Felipe and to attack Robert as well. So I was happy with fourth. 

“It was also the best positions for the team, third and fourth, because we knew that the McLaren and Red Bull was coming very quick to attack us in the last couple of laps, so my job at that time of the race was just to defend our third and fourth position, and not to attack anyone.”

Alonso says it’s all about the race results: “As I said on the winter tests my only goal is to win the championship, my only goal is to score points on Sunday, I’m not to worry about the winter tests, or the Friday or the Saturday afternoon, the glory. I only want the Sunday afternoon points, and I want to be World Champion at the end.

“Every race or every time I go in the car, my head is thinking in November I win a trophy. So I will race with maximum concentration, hopefully with not too many mistakes through the year.

“At the moment the team is giving us a fantastic car, a very [well] performing car in qualifying and in the race, so we took the advantage and we took the opportunity that Red Bull gave us in the first two races, but we know that we need to improve, we know that maybe we are not quick enough to fight or challenge for pole position with the Red Bulls, so we are working on that.”

Alonso said that Ferrari is not in a hurry to copy McLaren’s controversial rear wing innovation: “I don’t know if the top speed of the McLarens in the first two races is coming from the rear wing device, or the efficiency of the car. Maybe they run less downforce. It is very difficult to analyse that.

“Anyway, we are very happy with our car, and in overall performance we’ve been a little bit quicker than the McLarens, in qualy and the race. So there is no need to copy anything at the moment. We’ll keep working in our direction.”

Bruno Senna says that the Australian GP was a good weekend for the HRT team, despite his own early retirement. The Brazilian insists that the fact that Karun Chandhok made it to the finish is a boost that the team hadn’t expected from the early races of the year. In addition the cars were also pretty close to the Virgins on qualifying pace, something that hadn’t been anticipated after Bahrain. 

“We had some really silly hydraulic failure again, some small component that failed,” Senna told this blog. “But it’s very encouraging for us that Karun finished the race, because we shouldn’t expect to finish any of these first few races where we are just testing. My car has only done around 200kms, so not even a Grand Prix distance on the engine.”

Having started from the pitlane in Bahrain, Bruno did at least have his first experience of being on an F1 grid in Australia.

“I had a pretty decent start, and the competitive side always makes a difference. It’s always nice to be on the grid, even if it’s not the position you want to be in.

“I was quite careful into the first corner because everything was happening, I could see how things were transpiring so I decided to be a bit more careful, and I lost one of the positions I made on the start. There was no point, we are competing against ourselves, competing against our problems and other things, so it was better to try and finish the race.

“It’s a very tricky circuit in the wet, and grip levels were very low, and you could see everybody was struggling a little bit. Even though it was difficult I would have loved to have been a bit longer in the race and tried to put some pressure on somebody in front of me.”

Despite the disappointments, Bruno can see signs of progress.

“We’re getting there. It’s just a question of getting the car to work, because we haven’t had time to put the car on the rig and make a base set-up. The front and the rear are not connected! It becomes very inconsistent, it’s just a car that’s not been set-up yet, and only with time can we achieve that. For Europe, that’s when we can be looking at it.”

World Championships are won by picking up points on days when things don’t quite go right, and Fernando Alonso’s fourth place in Australia may prove to be very valuable as the season progresses.

The man himself noted that you can win a race and gain only seven points on a rival, whereas this time he gained 12 on Sebastian Vettel. For Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali, the result was certainly a relief.

“We need to go home very happy with the result of today, considering the situation that after the start we had one car on the gravel bed,” he said after the flag. “Felipe also had a little bit of a difficult weekend to have the right temperatures on the tyres to give the grip that we wanted.

“Having third and fourth places, and considering that the car that had two pole positions had two problems, we take on board all the points and I think that we can be really happy.

“To be honest with you at the first corner I thought, ‘One less’, and then let’s see what is going to happen. Considering the race of today, every corner we were there touching wood, as you say in English. It was really an incredible race, with the doubts of the strategy, with the doubts of the weather, with the doubts of the consistency of the tyres, and the fact that we knew we took a risk with doing just one stop. So a lot of things, and that’s the reason we are very happy.”

Domenicali said the decision not to stop for a second set of dry tyres was not an easy one. “We did some consideration on that to be honest, but considering the way the times were progressing we thought maybe we can take the risk of not doing a stop, and then after two or three laps then it was too late to change and defend the position, because otherwise we would have lost many more positions.”

Asked by this blog whether he enjoyed seeing the two Ferraris racing each other – as they did for much of the Australian race and rather forcibly at Turn One in Bahrain – Stefano said: “It’s like Hamilton and Button, I saw them side-by-side. Everyone has two cars – unless some teams want to drive with one car – and you have two good drivers, I think that has to be the nature of F1.”

Intriguingly Domenicali also admitted that the drivers were not allowed to race in the ‘final stint.’

“Not in the final stint, during the final stint we have let’s say an internal code of practice that unless there is an obvious situation, the [order] has to be respected. Otherwise you can attack, absolutely.”

It’s not clear when that call came into effect, given that strategies now call for a fewer stops. Indeed they both ran 49 laps from their single tyre stop to the flag…

As this blog had predicted on Friday, traffic proved to be a major factor in qualifying in Australia. And it was none other than Michael Schumacher who had the most public problem,  the German subsequently having words with Fernando Alonso he found the Ferrari driver in his way on his last timed lap.

Schumacher later played down the significance of the conversation, saying only that he’d asked Alonso whether he’d been told by the team that a quicker car was coming.

Nevertheless the incident has added a little extra edge to the relationship between the two men, as Alonso continues to try to step out of the shadow of his illustrious predecessor. Earlier this week the gossip in the paddock was that Fernando was unimpressed to find a visiting Michael enjoying the Ferrari catering. Both men are smart enough to forget any petty issues once on track, but nevertheless it was an intriguing incident.

“Basically on my last try I was slowed down by him,” said Schumacher. “I asked him whether the team told him, and he said no. In a way it’s difficult because he’d been on his in-lap and worrying for other things than maybe to watch the mirrors.

“But saying that we had this chat yesterday in the driver’s briefing, that this should be taken care about. And actually he was one of the main guys about it. So I just wanted to know whether the team had told him or not.

“I had a similar issue with Lewis. He was preparing his lap and blocking me in a way, which is not very nice. If you sit behind and you try your best – and that’s what I’m doing at this moment – and then you have somebody slowing down, it’s not very comfortable.”

Schumacher says he talked to FIA race director Charlie Whiting after the session to ascertain what is and what isn’t acceptable these days.

“I had a conversation with Charlie about this, because I need to now as well what is reference, what is the guidelines here, because the rules have changed a little bit to what they used to be, so I need to know what is it, what you’d be OK and what not.”

Mercedes boss Ross Brawn was sympathetic to his driver’s problem: “There’s a lot of traffic out there. I don’t think anyone was maliciously trying to stop anyone doing another lap, but trying to make a judgement call on how quick you need to go with a guy behind is not easy, I think there needs to be a certain tolerance, but people will also need reminding if they’ve spoiled someone’s lap. It was certainly a reasonable lap.”

Although Australia is particularly tight traffic will continue to be an issue this year. The real flash point could be the end of Q2. As Lewis Hamilton has discovered, with seven of 17 cars eliminated, that session can be fraught even for those with ostensibly quicker cars.