F1: Red Bull's Shanghai Surprise

You know that rule about the size and weight of hand-luggage? It doesn't apply to Formula One teams: several years ago, in Arrow's last season, a rash of their crew ran through London's Heathrow airport carrying everything from bubble wrapped suspension parts to a complete front wing.

It's still happening and as European airspace became gradually more closed off as Icelandic volcanic dust spread south, Red Bull's engineers found a route that helped them get some new parts out to Shanghai.

Lotus team principal, Tony Fernandez, got out of Paris where he had been awarded the Legion d'Honor just before the dust cloud closed Charles de Gaulle airport.

The teams has sent most of their stuff direct to China from Malaysia where the track opened for setting up their caravans last Monday.

The hand carried Red Bull parts brought the team yet another top-two positions in qualifying for today's Chinese Grand Prix with Alonso third despite having blown another engine, his second in two weekends, in practice.

But all teams are going to have trouble getting home. It's not known where the transport planes are: they certainly do not sit around for two weeks and if they are in Europe, then in Europe is where they will stay for the foreseeable future.

Lotus is planning to upsticks from China and take everything to Kuala Lumpur where they can be in control of the costs of delay and where they have, at least, some local storage. And hotels are much, much cheaper than in Shanghai.

For all teams, not being able to get people, cars and equipment back to base will prove disruptive and expensive. But, as our Aviation section has reported today, most major airlines are not expecting to resume a normal service until at least Wednesday.

All northern Italian airspace is closed - Ferrari and Torro Rosso could fly into Rome and truck up from there. The current status is that there will be a review at 18:00 GMT today but the general view of the cloud is that it's not going to go away and may worsen causing disruption for days to come.

Theoretically all the UK teams could fly into, say, Barcelona and, again, use land-transport but capacity on trans-channel routes is already fully booked so, ironically, they may find themselves trapped in their lorries and buses after the air has cleared.

Drivers living in Monaco can get home but much of Swiss airspace is closed.