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Lewis Hamilton wins British GP, slashes Vettel's lead to 1 point

SILVERSTONE, England - Lewis Hamilton won his home British Grand Prix for the fourth year in a row on Sunday, while a penultimate-lap puncture slashed Sebastian Vettel's championship lead to a single point. The Briton's drive from pole to flag on an overcast afternoon was lonely, uneventful and dominant - in complete contrast to his Ferrari rival's afternoon - with Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas finishing 14 seconds behind to secure the one-two. "The support has been incredible this weekend. I am so proud I could do this for you all," said Hamilton, who threw himself into the fans for some crowd surfing after the podium celebrations. "The team were faultless this weekend, Valtteri did an incredible job as well, so it's the perfect weekend for us." Far behind in his wake, as Hamilton cruised to a 57th career win and soaked up the applause from an army of flag-waving fans, came sudden drama. Vettel, who had battled on worn tires but looked like securing the final podium position until the blowout, finished seventh after an emergency pit stop with a shower of sparks from the wheel rim. "There was no sign of that happening," said Vettel over the team radio. "There were vibrations but I had it for 20 laps and it didn't get massively worse. The tires didn't look great but they never look great." The German's Finnish teammate Kimi Raikkonen, who had been second before also being hit with a late puncture that sent Bottas and Vettel ahead of him, took third. At the halfway stage of the 20-race season, Vettel has 177 points to Hamilton's 176 with Bottas on 154. Hungary, a circuit where the Briton has won five times before, is next up. Hamilton became only the third driver, after his late compatriot Jim Clark and Frenchman Alain Prost, to win the British Grand Prix five times and the first to take four successive victories at Silverstone. Clark won four in a row in the 1960s, but one was at Aintree and another at Brands Hatch. Red Bull's Max Verstappen finished fourth, ending a run of retirements, with Australian teammate Daniel Ricciardo fifth after fighting through the field. Germany's Nico Hulkenberg was sixth for Renault and Force India pairing Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez were eighth and ninth with Brazilian Felipe Massa securing the final point for Williams. Jolyon Palmer's miserable run continued, with Britain's only other driver on the grid failing to make the start after his Renault broke down on the formation lap with a brake failure.

Ferrari 458 Italia becomes most expensive prize ever on Price Is Right

In case you haven't been paying attention, it's "Big Money Week" on the long-running The Price Is Right televised game show. In a nutshell, it means that more than a million dollars in cash and prizes are up for grabs for those lucky enough to "come on down," play some games and correctly guess product retail prices.
Moments after opening the show Thursday, host Drew Carey broke the unexpected news. "Today you are going to see the single-most-expensive prize in the history of the daytime Price is Right," he boasted before the curtains were pulled back to review a brand-new Ferrari 458 Italia Spider.
To win the car, the contestant had to play "Three Strikes" - blindly pulling numbers out of a bag and putting them in the correct price sequence before grabbing three dreaded red strikes. As expected, your typical The Price Is Right contestant is about as familiar with today's retail Ferrari pricing as they are with fractional jet ownership. We won't spoil the fun of whether or not a lucky contestant gets to drive the $285,716 exotic home (and pay a midsize sedan's worth of taxes), but feel free to speed ahead to about the three-minute mark on the video below to watch the reveal.

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.