"Again, the car as delivered is a perfectly satisfactory customer car," Lisles continued, "But it has problems, and just because we at Newman/Haas have a problem with something doesn't mean that Panoz are going to rush off and fix it and produce however many sets they need to produce to give it to everybody. They're going to wait until everybody has the problem and, as quite a few of the cars haven't completed many miles, some of the problems have not become apparent across the grid because a number of cars aren't going quickly enough to encounter the problem."
According to Lisles, everyone at Newman/Haas is feeling frustrated that they are no longer masters of their own fate.
"Our biggest worry is reliability," he remarked, "We have had some reliability problems and we don't know if we're going to get the pieces which will bring the car to the kind of reliability that you need to win races and have a shot at the championship. When you have something that you think is marginal and you are not allowed to fix it and then it takes you out of a race and maybe a championship, that is extremely frustrating. So our biggest concern is that our reliability will be hostage to something that's out of our control.
"We still have issues," Lisles added, "There is no substantial proof that what we ended up with when we finished testing at Laguna is actually a long-term viable, reliable solution to some of these problems."
Micklewright agrees with Lisles in general terms, but is less critical about Panoz's response to fixing the DP01's development problems.
"It's not as easy to work on in some ways as the Lola was," Micklewright commented, "But there are areas we can improve on as long as we get permission from Champ Car to do those things. Some of it is the guys getting used to a new way of doing things and new systems and so forth. But certainly some of the things I anticipated being big issues have turned out not to be and some of the things I didn't think would be an issue have been. I think that's to be expected, to a certain degree, with any new racing car.
