by Russell Atkins
TO HEAR THE INTERVIEW IN FULL: CLICK HERE
Ross Brawn has completely raised the bar at Honda without changing or disrupting the way the team operates – that is the view of the underperforming outfit's CEO Nick Fry.
Brawn took over Fry's position as team principal at the Brackley-based squad last November, and the Japanese motoring giant is pinning its hopes on him working his magic in a similar way to that which he performed at Benetton and
Ferrari in the 1990s, by turning both teams from occasional grand prix winners into world champions.
“People realise Ross has got a very high benchmark,” Fry explained, speaking exclusively to
Crash.net Radio. “He knows what the best is and he can evaluate us against that.
“That gives people confidence that when they're doing the right thing they should just continue on that path, and when people are straying from the path it gives them confidence that someone is going to say ‘hang on a minute, go back in a different direction'.
“He is working with the same people in exactly the same structure and in the same way as it was organised before. He's not changed any of that, but the big difference is confidence, so on the one hand nothing at all has changed, but on the other hand everything has.”
One thing that certainly has changed is Fry's own role at
Honda, with the 51-year-old admitting he was run ragged in 2007 as he was forced to take on just
too much.
“It's made my life a lot easier in lots of ways!” he joked of Brawn's arrival. “Last year unfortunately I ended up doing a lot of things that possibly I wasn't qualified to do, because there were holes in the organisation which needed someone to do something. Probably I had many hats on, which meant that I was running around in every direction.
