MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) Alan Jones, the 1980 Formula One world champion, says his Australian compatriot Mark Webber will be spurred to outperform teammate Sebastian Vettel this season by reports that the German is getting paid twice as much.
Vettel recently signed a lucrative contract extension with Red Bull that lasts to the end of the 2014 season and which enhanced status since claiming the 2010 drivers' championship.
Webber is now a distinct No.2 in the team, and Jones said that should ignite the Australian's fighting spirit in Sunday's Australian Grand Prix and for the remainder of the season.
"I believe Mark's brutally realistic attitude to racing can put all that aside and that he will throw everything at Vettel and be a championship contender," Jones said in Melbourne newspaper The Age.
"If Mark needs any more incentive, what better than Vettel's new multiyear contract, which I'm told is about double what Mark is getting. If it was me, I'd take great delight in beating the driver who the team bosses thought was worth twice as much."
Jones said Webber must assert himself early in the season by outperforming Vettel, after the German got the upper hand toward the end of 2010 after a close tussle in the first half of the campaign.
"One of Mark's strengths is his ability to surround himself with a strong engineering support group focused totally on him," Jones said.
"He has had the best preseason preparation of his career and I reckon he has both the car and the self-belief to do it."
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ADIOS HISPANIA: Hispania became the first team to fall victim to Formula One's reintroduced '107 percent' rule and did not take its place in Sunday's race.
The rule dictates that in the first session of Saturday qualifying, any car that is not within seven percent of the best time will not be able to enter the race.
With the cut-off time set at 1:31.266, Vitantonio Liuzzi could manage only 1:32.978 and Narain Karthikeyan had 1:34.293. There was some expectation that Hispania would be allowed to race with the permission of rival teams, as it was the first race of the season, and appealed to stewards along those lines, but were turned down.
"If you're out, you're out," FIA chief technical delegate Charlie Whiting was quoted to say by Speed TV. "However, there is provision in the rule for the stewards to allow a car in under exceptional circumstances, which could include setting a good time in a previous session, or if there were changeable weather conditions that clearly disadvantaged some cars that couldn't get out at the beginning when it was dry.
"Those sorts of things, or generally speaking if a car's done a good time in (free practice) 3, for example, and has a mechanical problem and can't do a clear lap; we've seen it all before. Then the stewards are probably likely to allow the car to start. I personally don't believe that's the case with HRT (Hispania)."
Hispania team principal Colin Kolles was accepting of the decision, saying "in the end it just couldn't be, still I'm incredibly proud of my whole team."
"Our drivers produced the maximum in the least amount of time possible. We managed to get both cars ready in time for qualifying and proved that the car is capable of running a lot quicker than today.
"The circumstances in which we arrived were not as desired. We created a miracle again, but it wasn't enough. We'll be back stronger than ever in Malaysia. There we will have more time to test the car and show where the F111 really belongs."
Hispania came to Australia unprepared to compete, with neither car able to complete a lap in Friday's practice sessions as the crew worked long hours on Thursday night and through Friday to piece the cars together.
That eleventh-hour work raised the question of what state the team would have been in had the scheduled opening race of the season gone ahead in Bahrain two weeks' previously.
The team has received some sponsorship from Indian car manufacturer Tata this year, following the hiring of Karthikeyan, but the problems in Australia cast further questions upon its viability.
On the positive side, Kolles has widespread admiration among rival teams for his ability to keep the team going, technical director Geoff Willis too is also a respected name in F1 design, and the hiring of the experienced Liuzzi rather than a sponsor-laden rookie indicated a commitment to ontrack performance rather than purely money.
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NO KERS, NO WORRIES FOR RED BULL: The most surprising thing about Red Bull's speed advantage at the Australian Grand Prix is that it was achieved without the use of the KERS power-boost system.
Sebastian Vettel's pole position time was three-quarters of a second ahead of the best McLaren and 1.4 seconds better than the best Ferrari - huge margins in F1 terms - and to rub salt into their rivals' wounds, it was done without a KERS system that is estimated to cut about four tenths of a second per lap.
Neither Vettel, who careered away to an easy win in Sunday's race, or teammate Mark Webber used KERS in qualifying or race.
The KERS technology takes the energy from braking and stores it in batteries, which can then be used to provide a turbo-like power boost at the press of a button. The disadvantage is that the batteries are heavy; the entire device weighs about 25 kilograms.
The team experimented with KERS in Friday's practice sessions, but chose to do without the power burst, preferring a lighter and more nimble car.
"I'm afraid we haven't had KERS on our car all weekend," team principal Christian Horner said after the race. "It didn't look like we needed it. We ran it on Friday, but we felt it was a potential risk. We made a decision with KERS, it's quite a complicated technology and (chief designer) Adrian (Newey) being Adrian, he wouldn't compromise the aerodynamics of the car."
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