Podium or Pits, your essential digest of all the week’s winners and losers in F1, is a bonanza special edition this week!  For starters, this is the first festive POP in Badger’s very own advent calendar.  But wait, forget Christmas everyone… today marks the countdown towards an event of far greater importance than the birth of the messiah.  Today is officially the ‘100 days until Formula 1 returns’ day!

PODIUM – the Canadian grand prix - two weeks ago POP brought you the good news that the Belgian grand prix had been saved from the clutches of doom by the Belgian government, and this week the Canadian grand prix was also rescued from oblivion with help from the Canadian government.  They have have agreed to pump in a fairly hefty £8.5million per year for 5 years to secure the race on the Formula 1 calendar.  So that’s all dandy for Belgium and Canada, but if only Gordon Brown would take a hint and give the British grand prix the pocket money it needs to survive…

PITS – Manor GP – the team hasn’t even made it to the grid yet, but Manor GP as you know it will soon be gone, and replaced by… Virgin Racing!  Personally POP thinks that ‘Whore Racing’, ‘Filthly Racing’, or even ‘XXX Racing’, are all far jazzier names for a Formula 1 team.  But hey, whatever floats Richard Branson’s balloon…

PODIUM – Andy Soucek - Andy who?  The 2009 Formula 2 champion, and personal friend of the Badger, is rumoured to have secured a seat in Formula 1 for 2010!  As part of the deal for winning the reincarnated F2 series, Soucek was awarded a test with Williams F1 in Jerez, Spain, on Tuesday.  And he didn’t disappoint…  by topping the timesheets for the day he’s now in a great position for a switch to Formula 1.  Read the exclusive interview with Soucek, pronounced “soo-check” if you must know, here.

PITS – the French grand prix – this, my friends, is a classic example of how not to handle a national grand prix.  No French grand prix in 2009, none scheduled for 2010, the Magny-Cours circuit in a state of disrepair with shoddy infrastructure, and now… the scrapping of plans to build a new circuit in Flins-Mureaux.  Merde!  Seriously, take note Gordon Brown:  SAVE THE BRITISH GRAND PRIX, or feel the wrath of POP and it’s deadly ’stare of disapproval’.

PODIUM – funny F1 driver names Part II – continuing in POP’s quest to find the silliest name in Formula 1, the brilliantly-named Oliver Turvey caught POP’s eye this week.  The newly super-patriotic McLaren team chose the young British driver to test in Jerez this week, but his comments on the opportunity to test an F1 car are so entirely banal that POP will not bore you with their recital.  Instead, in the event Oliver does make it into Formula 1, POP would like to lay claim to this title right here, right now… ‘It’s all gone Topsy Turvey!’

PODIUM – Mr & Mrs Massa – gosh, that’s quite a tongue twister, ‘Mr & Mrs Massa’.  Moving on, POP would like to send congratulations to Felipe Massa and his wife Rafaela who became parents this week to little Felipe Massa Jr!  Aww, we’ll only have to wait another 18 years before little Felipe Jr embroils himself in a similarly explosive F1 scandal to rival that of Piquet Jr.  Those wayward little ‘uns!

PODIUM – Ferrari - they’ve done it again.  If you weren’t already aware, POP is a tad obsessed with the press releases of the Ferrari team.  This week they have truly surpassed themselves and actually coined a NEW WORD!  That’s right, Ferrari are actually reinventing the English language!  The word is Ferraristi, and it’s a bit like Glitterati, which means really famous celebrities, posh people, and the like.  POP would roughly define the new word as “denoting the membership of a person to the exclusive club of Ferrari-worshipping”, or rather, “Ferrari obsessive loser”.