BBC Sport brings you a regular round-up of the gossip in newspapers and on specialist websites around the world.

Briatore has not been at an F1 race since the 2009 Italian Grand Prix

Flavio Briatore has turned up at Monaco for his first visit to a grand prix since he was banned for life by motorsport's governing body the FIA for fixing the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, a judgement that has since been overturned in the French courts. Briatore had a meeting with F1 commercial boss Bernie Ecclestone.

Red Bull's Mark Webber has become the latest name to be linked with Ferrari for F1 2011, in a development that makes Felipe Massa's future at the Prancing Horse look ever-more tenuous.
Full story: crash.net

The rumour mill might repeatedly insist that Robert Kubica is all-but a shoo-in to move to Ferrari alongside double world champion and close friend Fernando Alonso in 2011, but new Renault F1 owner Gérard Lopez is adamant that provided he can give the Pole the tools and conditions to build his current team around him, he will neither want nor need to go anywhere else.
Full story: crash.net

Lotus boss Tony Fernandes has proposed scrapping the system whereby blue flags are waved at backmarkers to tell them to get out of the way of a faster car coming up behind them. "It was shrieked about when I first mentioned it, even within my team," Fernandes says. "It's certainly worth looking at, and it's gathering a bit of speed. It raised a few eyebrows (at a meeting of teams' association Fota). But I got a better reaction than I thought, to be honest." (AP)

Peter Sauber has delivered a firm vote of confidence in drivers Pedro de la Rosa and Kamui Kobayashi - after admitting he has been baffled by reports suggesting that their places have been under threat.
Full story: Autosport.com

Championship leader Jenson Button could have been driving for Red Bull this year instead of McLaren, if a proposed switch had come off.
Full story: The Daily Telegraph

Formula 1 could be headed for new climes in 2013. Rome and Sochi in Russia are the latest stops on F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone's plans for world domination.
Full story: The Daily Telegraph

Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone has admitted that new boys Hispania have problems and has acknowledged the possibility that not all of F1's 12 teams will make it to the end of the season.
Full story: The Daily Telegraph

Renault's Robert Kubica, who impressed in Thursday practice in Monaco, has played down talk that he has stolen a march on his rivals, instead the Pole thinks the rest of the grid will have cancelled out any advantage he might have had by the time qualifying starts on Saturday.
Full story: ESPN.com

It has long been rumoured but now it's official - Nicolas Todt, son of FIA president Jean Todt, is launching a bid to run his own F1 team, taking his highly successful GP2 team ART GP into the sport's highest category.
Full story: James Allen on F1l

McLaren chief engineer Pat Fry has left the team. It is not yet clear where he will end up but there has been speculation he will join up with former colleague Giorgio Ascanelli at Toro Rosso.
Full story: Joe Saward's grand prix blog

Lewis Hamilton's retirement from the Spanish Grand Prix was caused by a wheel failure which, said team principal Martin Whitmarsh in an official FIA media conference on Thursday, was "the consequence of backing off of the clamping load with the wheel nut". McLaren are not sure precisely why that happened, but suspect that the airguns were being delivered an erratic air pressure, leading to the wheel being able to flex.
Full story: FIA.com

Sebastian Vettel's brake failure at the Spanish Grand Prix was caused by a split disc. The front left brake disc "effectively split in half, straight down the middle of the spline," team principal Christian Horner said, "so effectively you just had a spacer in there and so he had only three brakes".
Full story: FIA.com

This story will be updated throughout the day.

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