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Berger and Vettel swap F1 cars old and new at the Red Bull Ring

This weekend the Formula One circus heads to Spielberg. No, not the Hollywood director, but the town in Austria that's home to the Österreichring. Subsequently known as the A1-Ring, these days it's called the Red Bull Ring, which makes this weekend's revived Austrian Grand Prix something of a home race for the defending champion Red Bull Racing team. But long before that it was the home race of the sixteen F1 drivers that call Austria their home - not the least of them Gerhard Berger.
The only Austrian driver to have won a grand prix (ten of them, all told) but not a championship, Berger was a fixture of F1 racing in the 1980s and 90s, spending much of his career driving for Ferrari. He later ran Scuderia Toro Rosso for three seasons, during which time Sebastian Vettel won his first (and still the team's only) grand prix. So with the Austrian Grand Prix back on the calendar for this weekend, the two highly accomplished drivers headed to the Red Bull Ring for a little juxtaposition.
Gerhard rolled in with the Ferrari F1/87-88C in which he won the 1988 Italian Grand Prix at Monza (which was, incidentally, the same race that Vettel won for STR twenty years later under Ferrari power), and Seb in his championship-winning RB8. Then they switched off, giving the four-time world champion his first chance to drive a grand prix racer with three pedals. If you can't believe that, it's also (as far as we can tell) the first time, despite years of neck-and-neck competition and retention of some of the best drivers on the grid, that a Red Bull or Toro Rosso driver has driven a Ferrari F1 car, and vice versa. See how it went down in the video below.

Even Ferrari swept up in latest Takata recall expansion

The scope of Takata's deadly airbag problems continues to widen. Eight manufacturers announced recalls Friday that affect more than 12 million vehicles, according to documents filed with federal regulators. The automakers include Honda, which is recalling 4.5 million units, Fiat Chrysler with 4.3 million, Toyota with 1.65 million, and Subaru, which is recalling almost 400,000. Some of these cars include the Saab 9-2x and Pontiac Vibe that Toyota and Subaru made for General Motors. Mazda will recall 730,000 vehicles and Nissan has 400,000 affected units. The smallest numbers were posted by Mitsubishi, with 38,000 Lancers manufactured from 2006 to 2007, and as a noteworthy high-end manufacturer, Ferrari is calling back 2,800 vehicles. These are all US-market cars. Beyond America, the Japanese Transport Ministry has announced seven million additional vehicles will be recalled, which means 19.6 million vehicles across the globe are affected by recalls announced. The defects have been traced to an insufficiently manufactured airbag inflator, which lacks a drying agent that would prevent the inflators from deteriorating over time. Thirteen deaths have been linked to the faulty airbags, which have become unstable and are prone to exploding and showering vehicle occupants with lethal amounts of metal shrapnel. A private equity firm, KKR & Co., has been named in a possible buyout of the struggling Takata. Related Video: News Source: ReutersImage Credit: Shutterstock Government/Legal Recalls Ferrari Honda Mazda Automakers Mitsubishi Nissan Pontiac Subaru Toyota Saab Safety

Ferrari production to increase under Marchionne

The head of any company has to juggle the relationship between supply and demand. Of course, that applies to automakers too, even ones as high-end as Ferrari. And as with many other decisions, the way Ferrari has addressed supply and demand has come down principally to the principal.
Enzo Ferrari may have only wanted to sell as many vehicles as he needed in order to fund his company's racing department, but with the F40 - the last model made under his watch - Ferrari ended up increasing supply to meet growing demand. However, after Luca di Montezemolo took over in the wake of Enzo's passing, he started constricting supply. He figured Ferrari could sell 400 units of the F50, for example, so he built 399. More recently, Montezemolo undertook a course of action that spread Ferrari into more markets, while simultaneously constricting supply to increase demand and thereby profitability.
It's been a winning formula for Ferrari. Just days ago, the company announced record earnings up by 14.5 percent in the first half of 2014 over the same period last year, which itself had seen a 7.1-percent increase over the year before. Clearly the strategy has worked, but Montezemolo's successor is already eying a different approach.