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The great Alan Henry with close friend Niki Lauda and Clay Regazzoni in 1976

F1 journalist and author Alan Henry, always known to his friends as ‘AH,’ has passed away at the age of 68. Hugely respected by colleagues, drivers and other F1 insiders, he was one of the sport’s most influential writers for over four decades.

Alan started as a freelancer in club racing in 1968 while working for Barclays International. He gave up the security of a ‘proper’ job to join Motoring News in 1970. In 1973 he became the publication’s full time F1 correspondent, and in 1978 he was appointed editor. Later he became the Grand Prix editor of Autocar as well as correspondent for The Guardian. He was also consultant editor and a columnist at F1 Racing.

In addition to his routine day-to-day reporting duties he also became a prolific author, and was for many years the editor of the Autocourse annual.

One of his first works was a biography of his close friend Ronnie Peterson, originally published in 1975, which remains the definitive story of the ‘Superswede.’ Later he wrote books with the likes of Derek Bell and John Surtees, as well as histories of marques such as McLaren, Ferrari, Williams, March and Brabham.

Access to drivers and team personalities was much easier in the past than it is now, but even by the standards of the time Alan had extraordinary close relationships with many of the sport’s biggest players. He could count Niki Lauda as a personal friend – as with Peterson they met in F2 days – and from the early years was close to the likes of Bernie Ecclestone, Max Mosley, Ron Dennis and Frank Williams.

All these guys trusted and respected him, even when he was critical of them in print. That special bond ensured that he always got to the bottom of any story. In the years before internet sound bites Alan’s words and opinions always had authority, and they will continue to do so for anyone reading about the past.

As well as being a brilliant writer he was also a superb raconteur, always ready with an amusing anecdote about a driver, team owner or colleague that could never make it to the printed page.

Illness forced Alan to stop travelling to races a few years ago, but he remained in touch with the sport, and he still came to the British GP. He was a member of the BRDC, and at one point served on the organisation’s board.

I met Alan in the mid-80s and he was always very encouraging as I tried to make a career in the motor racing business, offering me much appreciated work in the Autocourse book that he edited. I offer my sincere condolences to Alan’s family and to his close friends and colleagues in the F1 world.

Just a sample of the dozens of books written by Alan over the years

Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds says that the elimination F1 qualifying format proposed for 2016 won’t necessarily improve the show on Saturday, but it will shake up the grid for Sunday.

Symonds stressed that all teams have a lot of work to do by Melbourne if the system is confirmed for the first race.

“It’s going to be quite tough,” he said. “We certainly need to spend a lot more time thinking about it. I don’t think it’s going to improve qualifying itself, in fact I think there’s a danger qualifying might not be as exciting, it may not build up to that final crescendo. But what it has a good chance of doing is improving the race.

“It’s quite a difficult situation, it’s done at very short notice, we’re not going to have a lot of time to get our thoughts together and optimise everything and write loads of software to help us optimise it. And so I think all of us are going to make mistakes, especially early on and that means there will be occasions when cars are out of position. We will see some of the quicker cars a bit further back, and we all know that’s given us some great races in the past.

Teams have already made their tyre selections for the early races, and Symonds admitted that those choices might have different.

“This year we have more say in the selection of the tyres. We’ve already the nominations for the first few races, and we’ve done that without the knowledge that the qualifying procedure was going to change. I’m sure that as we analyse it we will say has we known this, we would have chosen differently, but the fact is we are in the same boat, so I don’t think it’s such a big deal.

“There’s a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, not just for us but for FOM to redo the software that handles the timing systems and things like that. It’s quite a tough call.”

Force India revealed its new VJM09 in Barcelona today amid optimism about the team’s chances of at least retaining its fifth place in the World Championship.

The team says that the car is based on last year’s as it preferred to devote resources to next year’s project.

“You can say the b-spec car from last year formed a basis on which to build our 2016 one,” said technical director Andy Green. “We were in a situation in which the performance on track was very good, and in which the data we were getting correlated well to what we were expecting, so we knew we could continue to develop on a solid platform. With the regulations likely to change for 2017, it didn’t really seem like an efficient use of our resources to start from scratch on a project that would have such a limited lifetime.”

“I want us to begin 2016 in the same way that we ended 2015,” said team boss Vijay Mallya. “Our technical team is excited about the progress we have made over the winter and there’s every reason to believe we can stay at the front of the midfield battle.”

As in previous years the team has a solid update programme in place: “The wind tunnel programme in Cologne is maturing nicely and I’m encouraged by the gains we have made over the winter, “ said COO Otmar Szafnauer. “The first major aero updates should be on the car in time for Melbourne and we also plan another big step for the start of the European season.”

The Haas VF-16 was officially unveiled online today, after a brief on-track outing in a filming session at Barcelona on Saturday.

As expected the car has a predominantly grey and red livery, while its type number is derived from the VF-1, the first machine made by Haas in 1988, with V being an industry standard for a vertical mill.

“Just as Haas Automation’s products continually evolve, becoming better and more efficient, our methodology behind the VF-16 was to make it the best evolution of a good F1 car,” said team boss Guenther Steiner. “We’re a new team, so we looked at what the successful teams were doing to give us a baseline of the direction we needed to go with our design.

“We have very experienced designers who worked hard to develop all the little things from an aerodynamic perspective that, collectively, add up to a lot. And our technical partner, Ferrari, provided our power unit, and that really defined the rear end of the car and how big it needed to be.

“Our goal with this car is to score points First, we need to go out there and show that we can do the job, that we can finish races, that we are respected by the fans and other teams in the paddock. Then, we want to score points. That is the ultimate goal.”

McLaren has released the first pictures of the MP4-31, ahead what will surely be a critical period of testing for the team and engine partner Honda.

“The guys have shown intense dedication throughout the winter period, and the result is that they’ve successfully kept our aggressive build and development programmes on schedule,” said Eric Boullier. “As such, all our team members are a credit to McLaren-Honda, and consequently we’re incredibly grateful to everyone involved in the development of the MP4-31.

“But we’re never satisfied, which is why we’ve continued to strengthen our engineering team in recent weeks and months, and we’re confident that the changes we’ve made will improve and accelerate our car-development progress in the future.

“So the two Barcelona tests will merely herald the continuation of the huge collaborative task that all departments have been engaged in during the off-season. We’ll be aiming to spend the four days of the first test carefully and methodically, extracting the maximum from the time available, and concentrating our efforts on proving out our central systems, operational procedures and electronics checks.

“We’ll need to verify our work in the garage before we can expect any miracles on track – essentially, to ensure we walk before we can run.”

Williams became the first team to show its 2016 car when it revealed images of the FW38 via Twitter today.

The Grove team has tried to address the weaknesses of last year’s package, and specifically slow speed performance.

“The FW37 was a pretty effective car and so we concentrated on understanding the areas where we could improve it without losing the attributes which made it effective,” said chief technical officer Pat Symonds. “It is no secret that the low speed performance of the FW37 didn’t match its high speed performance, so a lot of time was spent looking into why this was and subsequently making changes, which we hope will improve the situation. On top of this we looked at the normal physical obstacles to development that one always meets during the life of a car and tried to push those barriers back.

Regarding when the design process started he added: “This is always slightly difficult to answer precisely as one is always discussing the path of improved performance with the senior engineers. However in mid-January 2015, before the FW37 had even run, we held a meeting to try and work our way through a concept ‘shopping list’ and to narrow down the areas in which we hoped the FW38 would out perform its pre-nascent forerunner.

“As we started running the FW37 we could see more clearly the design directions we wanted to take with the next car and at the same time started laying out the basic architecture such that critical path items would hit their design release targets. The monocoque and gearbox, for example, fall into this category as both need considerable time, not just in design but also in structural analysis.”

Red Bull Racing has submitted a design study for a canopy alternative to the Halo F1 cockpit protection option currently preferred by the FIA.

Engineers from five F1 teams – including experts on stress analysis – are meeting with FIA safety expert Andy Mellor in London today to talk about how to integrate the Halo, and it’s understood that the RBR idea will also feature in the discussions if there’s time.

The RBR idea features a combination of a “glass” material and carbon, as did a recent idea that emerged from Mercedes.

The key for the FIA is that the current Halo design has already gone through a lot of testing and there may not be time to complete that process.

“Obviously head protection is crucial,” said Christian Horner when asked by this writer. “Red Bull is making another submission for a canopy that we believe will be a safer option. It’s more of a canopy than a Halo. But it needs to be tested, which hopefully can be done very quickly.

“We have a committed a design study on evolving the FIA’s theme, and we feel there’s a viable solution.”

Asked if it could be readied for 2017, Horner added: “Why not?”