All the teams are in constant dialogue with Champ Car's technical chiefs Scot Elkins and Tony Cotman as everyone tries to use their skill and experience to make the car as bullet-proof as possible going into the first three races. But Lisles points out that race teams and car manufacturers have very different and often conflicting priorities.
"Typically, with a race team, as soon as you have a problem you make the basic assumption that if you have it once, it can occur again at anytime," he said, "So you go ahead and fix it. You don't wait for it to occur again to prove that, statistically, you have a one-in-four chance of it happening. If it happens once, you assume it's going to happen again, unless there's some clear and obvious reasons why it happened and it won't happen again.
"But this is always the problem of any series where you have these shared, common value items, particularly where fixing the problem may cost somebody a lot of money who really isn't affected if the problem occurs every now and again. To us, one failed gearshift could cost us a race. To a supplier, it's just a failed gearshift.
"So we have very different priorities," Lisles continued, "And it's been extremely frustrating to have to stand by when it's pretty clear that things needed to be done with gearshifts that don't shift fast enough, failures in the shifting hardware, and very slow response on the software. We would have had programmes written back in the shop and fixed it ourselves. But now, we're just completely living on blind faith that somebody's going to turn up and give us stuff that's going to work.
"It can be extremely frustrating when we know there's a better solution, or one that actually could be a lot less expensive. In several cases we've been stuck with solutions which are actually going to potentially cost us a lot of money when a decision made in a slightly different way would have been much more straightforward and cost effective.
