MW:
I think Mark has a different background to Jost [Capito]. Mark has been in sales and marketing during most of his time at Ford. But he did have a spell in motorsport from the mid to late 1980s. Ford are looking to maximise value on their investment in the WRC and they feel that there is a lot more to be gained - hopefully, from the marketing and public affairs point of view. Jost is now moving across to look at high performance road cars for the future, which again I think sends out a great message about the commitment Ford has got to the world championship and to future performance cars. It is a very positive step for the longer term.
Crash.net:
How confident are you that the
BP Ford WRT can continue to run at the front next season?
MW:
I feel very confident. Mikko has continued to do an incredible job for the team this year in backing up Marcus on many occasions. He was there again to win in Japan when Marcus went off the road and again he was there in Ireland just to continue around and make sure that he got us the necessary points to clinch our second manufacturers' championship. I am really happy for him that he has got the opportunity now on Rally GB to go on the attack and try and get his pace where it needs to be for next year. But he has won two rallies this year and I am sure he can win more than that next year. It is going to be very difficult to replace Marcus but I am confident Mikko can step up and step up to do the job very, very well. Hopefully we will see a little bit of that on Rally GB and then hopefully it will continue throughout the whole of 2008.
Crash.net:
Will we see a development of the Focus RS WRC 2007 in 2008?
MW:
Yeah you will. We are non-stop developing all of the time though and at what point in the year we will make that evolution I don't know at this moment in time. But it will probably be around the middle of the year again, like we did this year in Finland, which worked very, very well. Since we have introduced the '07 version we haven't actually been beaten on gravel. It was obviously a step forward and even though it is very difficult now, with the way the regulations are to keep making improvements, but I am sure Christian [Loriaux] and his team will be pushing very hard to try and find some improvements.
Crash.net:
Will it be a case of more refinements and tweaks?
MW:
That is all you can do now because again the regulations are so well controlled, which I think is a great thing by the
FIA. It leaves less and less scope, which is good because it helps keep the cars so evenly matched as we have seen this year on quite a few rallies with how close Marcus and Sebastien have been. It is a great way to keep all the teams competitive and also it controls costs. It makes it more challenging for the designers and engineers but I am sure they will come up with something that is going to give us an improvement for the second half of next year.
