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Vettel wins in Hungary as Ferrari finishes first and second

Sebastian Vettel won a tense Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday in a Ferrari one-two that stretched his championship lead to 14 points after Mercedes rival Lewis Hamilton sportingly surrendered third place to his team mate. The German, savoring his fourth win of the season and 46th of his Formula One career, took the chequered flag 0.9 seconds ahead of team mate Kimi Raikkonen. The Finn had looked faster than Vettel for most of the afternoon. "I'm over the moon, that was a really difficult race," said the winner, who had to wrestle with a skewed steering wheel on a sweltering afternoon at the Hungaroring and had no room for error. Hamilton finished fourth after slowing down on the last lap and allowing Finnish team mate Valtteri Bottas to go past, despite the loss of vital points to the Briton's championship challenge. Bottas had let Hamilton through on the 45th of the 70 laps, on the assurance that his team mate would hand back the place if he could not overtake the Ferraris, and the triple champion duly kept his word. "Really thanks to Lewis for keeping the promise in the end and letting me by," said Bottas. "I don't think every team mate would have swapped back." Hamilton, whose radio was malfunctioning for some of the race and would have had more of a chance had he got past Bottas earlier, said he had done what he had to do. "It's tough in the championship but I'm a man of my word," he said. "I did say that if I can't overtake them I would let him back through." On a circuit where overtaking is notoriously hard, the top five all finished in their starting order with Max Verstappen fifth for Red Bull. The Dutch teenager was handed a 10-second stop and go penalty for colliding with his Australian team mate Daniel Ricciardo on the opening lap. The impact ended Ricciardo's race, with the car stranded on the track and fluid leaking from the broken radiator, and brought out the safety car. "It's not on. It was amateur to say the least. It's not like he was trying to pass – there was no room to pass," said an angry Ricciardo. "I don't think he likes it when a team mate gets in front. You've got the whole race to try and repair the mistake but the pass was never on. It wasn't even a pass, it was a very poor mistake." Fernando Alonso, who celebrated his 36th birthday on Saturday, gave struggling McLaren their best finish of the season so far by taking sixth place and also setting the fastest lap of the race.

BMW, Ferrari, VW cars use tungsten mined by terrorists

Bloomberg Markets is reporting that BMW, Volkswagen and Ferrari have been using tungsten ore sourced from Columbia's FARC rebel terrorists. The extensive story focuses on Columbia's illegal mining trade and calls into question the provenance of the rare ore that is used not only in crankshaft parts production, but is also found in the world's computing and telecommunications industry for use in screens.
The ore is mined by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army), and exported to Pennsylvania, where it is refined. The refined ore is then sent over to Austria, where a company called Plansee turns it into a finished product. Now, it's important to note that we aren't talking about the world's supply of tungsten here. In 2012, Plansee's American refinery purchased 93.2 metric tons of tungsten, valued at $1.8 million. That's peanuts, with the entire Colombian tungsten mining industry producing just one percent of the world's supplies.
That doesn't make indirectly supporting FARC any more acceptable, though. BMW, VW and Ferrari are all committed to not accepting mineral supplies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also in the grips of a guerrilla insurrection funded, in part, by illegal mining. The same commitment would figure to extend to Colombian mining, but as BMW points out, it's difficult for a multi-national manufacturer to know where every item in its supply chain comes from. A company spokesperson says as much, telling Bloomberg, "These few grams out of the billions of tons of raw materials passing through the BMW supply chain are of no practical relevance."

EV cost burden pushing automakers to their limits, says Stellantis' CEO Tavares

DETROIT — Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said external pressure on automakers to quickly shift to electric vehicles potentially threatens jobs and vehicle quality as producers struggle with EVs' higher costs. Governments and investors want car manufacturers to speed up the transition to electric vehicles, but the costs are "beyond the limits" of what the auto industry can sustain, Tavares said in an interview at the Reuters Next conference released Wednesday. "What has been decided is to impose on the automotive industry electrification that brings 50% additional costs against a conventional vehicle," he said. "There is no way we can transfer 50% of additional costs to the final consumer because most parts of the middle class will not be able to pay." Automakers could charge higher prices and sell fewer cars, or accept lower profit margins, Tavares said. Those paths both lead to cutbacks. Union leaders in Europe and North America have warned tens of thousands of jobs could be lost. Automakers need time for testing and ensuring that new technology will work, Tavares said. Pushing to speed that process up "is just going to be counter productive. It will lead to quality problems. It will lead to all sorts of problems," he said. Tavares said Stellantis is aiming to avoid cuts by boosting productivity at a pace far faster than industry norm. "Over the next five years we have to digest 10% productivity a year ... in an industry which is used to delivering 2 to 3% productivity" improvement, he said. "The future will tell us who is going to be able to digest this, and who will fail," Tavares said. "We are putting the industry on the limits." Electric vehicle costs are expected to fall, and analysts project that battery electric vehicles and combustion vehicles could reach cost parity during the second half of this decade. Like other automakers that earn profits from combustion vehicles, Stellantis is under pressure from both establishment automakers such as GM, Ford, VW and Hyundai, as well as start-ups such as Tesla and Rivian. The latter electric vehicle companies are far smaller in terms of vehicle sales and employment. But investors have given Tesla and Rivian higher market valuations than the owner of the highly profitable Jeep and Ram brands. That investor pressure is compounded by government policies aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union, California and other jurisdictions have set goals to end sales of combustion vehicles by 2035.