Air Asia Airbus in Williams F1 Livery

AirAsia is a sponsor of the Williams F1 team, and has recently extended the 3 year contract. As the 2008 Formula-1 championship was kicked off a week ago in Melbourne, Australia, the second round is arriving to Kuala Lumpur for the coming weekend. To mark the Malaysian Grand Prix and the sponsorship with Williams, AirAsia has painted one of its Airbus A320’s into a special, Williams F1 livery.

The aircraft, whose livery is an exact look-alike of the AT&T Williams racing car, with Williams’ traditional racing colours of blue and white, whilst the ‘nose’ of the aircraft is designed to look like Nico Rosberg’s racing helmet. At the belly of the aircraft you can also find painted Bridgestone tyres in the front and in the aft part as well. The aircraft (new registration number: 9M-AFW) was named ‘Sir Frank Williams’ in tribute to Sir Frank Williams, Team Principal of Williams.

Nico Rosberg said: “It has been incredible to see the AT&T Williams livery on AirAsia’s plane. I’m delighted that the design of my helmet, which I have been racing with all my life, has been used to create a lasting tribute to the team’s partnership with Air Asia.” Kazuki Nakajima has added: “I am very impressed at how well the Williams Toyota FW30’s design has translated to the SFW30 Airbus. I think we would all like to thank AirAsia for this great venture and we are proud to be associated with the Airline of the Year 2007. This is indeed a source of inspiration to both of us going into the Malaysian Grand Prix this weekend.”

A high resolution picture of the plane on airliners.net by Rajesh Changela:

by balint01

Red Bull Driving and Flying Circus in Budapest

Budapest is hosting the 11th round of the 2007 Formula-1 Championship this weekend. This will be the 22nd Hungarian F1 Grand Prix. This weekend’s events took off with a small parade in the city center. As you all know Red Bull is the main sponsor of the Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso teams. Red Bull on the other hand also sponsors the so called Red Bull Air Race. The idea of this air race came from a Hungarian pilot, Peter Besenyei. He has been world champion in stunt flying several times and probably he found it boring just to fly around, so he came up with the idea of this race. Besides pilots, we spectators enjoy it, too and downtown Budapest has been a traditional venue of the Air Race World Championship as well, on August 20th, every year.

So the point in the parade today was that we could see an F1 car and a stunt flight meeting up at the famous Chain Bridge in Budapest. Meeting up meant that Mr Besenyei flew through under (!) the bridge, while the Red Bull F1 car drove over it.

Besides this weird randez vous, there were several other interesting participants of this short parade today. Actually there was more action and more vehicles on the ground than in the air, but for us, airline world bloggers, the air stunts were more a bit more eye catching, even though we loved the cars as well. So besides the Edge 540 stunt plane of Besenyei, we saw the following cars: the Official safety car of the F1 Championships: a Mercedes-Benz CLK 63 AMG, several participants of the Dakar rally (Hungarians and Red Bull associates), the current Red Bull Renault RB3 and Toro Rosso STR-02 F1 cars driven by Mark Webber and Vitantonio Liuzzi, and then came some historic F1 cars (McLaren MP4 from 1987 driven by Gerhard Berger, two old Tyrells from the early 1970’s and a red-and white 1971 Surtees).

As you may know Red Bull is an Austrian company and as Hungary is a neighbouring country, they tend to consider the Hungarian GP as their “closest to home” race each year. Gerhard Berger has always admitted that he loves Budapest and feels home over here, especially as when he was still racing, many of his home fans came to cheer him over here. Now he’s a team owner but still likes this event very much, that’s why accepted the invitation to drive an older F1 car on the streets of Budapest after so many years of not driving.

And here are the pictures:

By balint01 & Szafi

Coinciding Boeing Numbers in Formula-1 Statistics

I have recently found some interesting statistics about last weekend’s Formula-1 European Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, Germany. The below table shows the top drivers from last weekend in terms of laps and kilometers accomplished. It’s almost like a special airline related table with half of the Boeing numbers (and they are in order, too)!

“Massa came in one kilometer short of a Jumbo Jet!” 🙂

	Driver	Team	km/weekend	Laps/weekend
01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06.	N. Heidfeld J. Trulli R. Kubica M. Webber A. Davidson F. Massa	BMW Toyota BMW Red Bull Super Aguri Ferrari	808 808 777 767 757 746	157 157 151 149 147 145

It’s funny how these coinciding numbers can come up accidentally, and it’s funny how they catch someone’s attention who’s an airline enthusiast! (sorry, couldn’t resisit publishing it) 🙂

by balint01