Questions from the floor:
Q: (Dan Knutson –
National Speed Sport News)
Willy, can you tell us how
Robert Kubica has developed as a driver from his first race through to the last two when he's been on the podium?
Willy Rampf
Obviously he has gained a lot of experience and I think especially this winter, when we brought the new car onto the track, it was very important that we relied on and got very exact feedback from the drivers to develop the car, because if it comes to balance issues, it's not always so easy to see it in the wind tunnel or on the data. So here we were relying on the drivers, both drivers. I think Robert did a very good job. His comments are quite precise and quite repeatable, and this is very important for us. For sure he learned a lot, he made a step up compared to last year but he also has much more experience than last year.
Q: (Mike Doodson)
I'm interested to know if the changes made over the last three or four years have saved money and if they will save money in the future?
Adrian Newey:
It depends whether you are a customer such as
Williams and ourselves or whether you are a manufacturer in the first place. Certainly in our case with
Renault, it hasn't really had very much effect because what Renault charge us for is the manufacture, supply and operation of the engines, not the development. That they absorb within their works' effort. For us as privateers, it hasn't really had very much effect. I'm sure for the manufacturers themselves it has had an effect, depending on how they've taken it. Some manufacturers have really cut right back and taken the intent of the engine freeze – which was to stop spending as much money on the development of the engine – to heart. Other manufacturers have continued spending on smaller gains, accepting that whilst the gains will be smaller per euro spent, there were still gains available. I don't know if that answers your question. From now on, when there is a more solid freeze, then the cost to the manufacturers will probably go down as well. Again, there's no sign from the supplied teams, which you could argue are perhaps those who would most like the financial assistance, that it has actually made much difference.
WR:
I don't know about a figure about overall engine costs but overall, the number of engines has gone down because with frozen engines, the development programme is much much lower than it was before and for each modification we do on an engine, you have to do quite a few dyno runs. It means that it's not only a development programme but also for reliability reasons. To confirm it you have to run a lot of engines and this is not necessary any more. So for sure there is a significant step down in engine costs.
Pat Symonds:
I think that your question was about changing the engine, rather than the engine freeze. Obviously changing the engine, going from the V10 to the V8, did require a lot of money, change always does. The freeze is a different thing, and certainly at Renault we embraced the freeze and we took it in the spirit in which it was intended and it did save us a lot of money. As Willy said, for every development that you do, you need to run engines on the dyno. They're not cheap, these engines, and I think that's one of the problems with the frozen engine. We've actually frozen an engine that is an expensive engine. It's an engine that we designed to run at over 20,000rpm and I think that if we had known at the time that the freeze was coming and it was designed, we would probably have worked harder at reducing the unit costs of the engine. They are expensive engines, as I say. It depends whether they are test or race engines but they approach a quarter of a million euros an engine. But our engine-related budget has gone down considerably since the engine freeze, so it has been good for us. I don't think I'll talk numbers. Or percentages.
Aldo Costa:
Very similar situation for us also. For us, the rules have meant big cost reduction in engine activity in terms of development costs, in terms of costs of overall units that you produce in a year, and also it reduced the number of people involved in the engine department, really, so it was a bigger cost-saving. As Pat said, we could probably have done more in terms of reducing the unit price of the engine and I have to add another point. We could have done more to increase the mileage of the engines before freezing, so instead of two races, we could probably have done something more, even better. But OK, we have to accept the situation as it was done.
Sam Michael:
Just to finish on that point Aldo just raised, because that's also a significant point that changed two or three years ago, and that's going from the quantity of engines that we used to use. We used to go through twelve engines every two race weekends. We now go through two, so that's come down by a factor of six, because we used to change engines… engines used to do 350 kilometres, so you would change them every night on both cars. Notwithstanding what Adrian said, because he's right about the cost to private teams, but if you actually said right, you need to multiply the number of engines you need now by six, then that would be a pretty big number.
Q: (Michael Schmidt –
Auto Moto und Sport)
Question to Aldo Costa: It seems that
Ferrari is playing down the importance of the new nose a little bit. To say it's just another aero development sounds a bit odd. I think it's a big effort to do that, bigger than just putting a new flap on, so it must be worth it.
AC:
Yeah, of course you have to consider the performance gain versus the money you spend doing this development because we don't have an infinite budget. So performance development versus cost was something worth doing, for sure. As you say, it was probably a bit bigger in terms of advantage than a small flap or a front wing endplate. But in terms of performance advantage it's in the range of other car developments that we do during the year.
