Friday press conference - Japanese GP - Pt. 2.

Team members: Ove Andersson (Toyota), Patrick Head (Williams), Peter Sauber (Sauber), Paul Stoddart (Minardi) and Geoff Willis (BAR).

Questions from the floor.

Friday press conference - Japanese GP - Pt. 2.

Team members: Ove Andersson (Toyota), Patrick Head (Williams), Peter Sauber (Sauber), Paul Stoddart (Minardi) and Geoff Willis (BAR).

Questions from the floor.

Q:
Paul, in Canada you announced your Caped Crusader, Mr Ecclestone who we all thought would bring a lot to your team. I wonder if you've had a cheque or anything else from Mr Ecclestone. Could you tell us what the progress is with your relationship with him, and I wondered also if with his influence you could persuade some of your faulty sponsors to pay up eventually?

Paul Stoddart:
There's a couple of good questions there. First of all, Bernie's influence, as you put it, has helped the team and I think I can make it very clear today that although he hasn't invested any actual money that's largely because the team has actually improved its position since Canada in terms of sponsorship and funding itself, which is probably the best way for it to go. But certainly having Bernie in the background has done no harm at all, more perhaps for the future than for the present. And sadly, no, he has had no influence on non-paying sponsors but I wish he had.

Q:
Is there any possibility that Bernie will take an equity interest in the team?

PSt:
I think not. I have to say that I am more anxious to see the outcome of either GPWC with the banks or a new Concorde Agreement because that's really where teams like Minardi and Jordan are going to get their future funding from. There will be a time when the sponsorship improves but I don't see it as being immediate.

Q:
Paul, at the beginning of the year we had press conferences and you were talking about helping out small teams. In the middle of the year we had press conferences and you were talking about helping out the small teams and here we are at the end of the year and in a press conference where you're talking about small teams. Is anyone actually going to help the small teams?

PSt:
In a word? I think you know the answer. No. That's not strictly fair, we have had a little bit of help this year but, no, it wasn't the fighting fund and no it wasn't what was well publicised back on January 15th. But there are reasons for that and I think long term, the only way forward, as I've said before, is that we need a new Concorde Agreement. It's not easy at the back of the grid but, then again, that's my problem. We're at the back of the grid because we haven't done a good enough job, I suppose, to attract any sponsors. But it would have been nice if the full fighting fund had been delivered, yes.

Q:
And can I ask you and Ove where the situation currently stands between the car manufacturers and the banks and a settlement? Is it close or is it far away?

PSt:
I think, if I answer it first, my understanding is that there was almost a deal but it's not yet happened. What is a short time and what is a long time? I would like to be optimistic and think that we're going to see a solution this year but I have to be a realistic and think that it won't be this year. I'm eternally hopeful that it will be the early part of next year.

Q:
Is there any difference of opinion from Peter or Ove?

Peter Sauber:
You know exactly. My English is not good enough to speak about political things.

Ove Andersson:
My English is also a bit... We don't really know too much of what is going on but we have understood that there should be a deal just around the corner but we will have to wait and see. There is no concrete information on it as far as I know.

Patrick Head:
I think there's often a bit of a misnomer in assuming that the teams at the back of Formula One are tightly strapped for cash and the teams near the front are rolling in cash and desperately looking for what they can do with their excess. I'm not sure about the other teams around us but it certainly isn't the case for the Williams team and I was surprised to read that our new deal with BMW apparently means that we are going to receive $700m in the next five years. Well, I have to say that none of the documentation I've seen mentions anything that has any sort of serious number on it. The fact of the matter is, that for the teams who are at the front at the moment, and obviously all teams aspire to be at the front. But they have to plan their way forward, but you're all having to spend and commit to the level to compete against the strongest opposition, and at the moment the strongest opposition is Ferrari and you were talking earlier about 48 test days and whether that's 48 car test days. Well, as it's being stated at the moment, it's 48 test days and I doubt that Ferrari are going to sit there and say 'oh well, we'll halve our testing mileage.' Albeit that you can be more or less efficient during testing, there's very little testing you do where you learn nothing. And obviously, if you're limited to 48 test days it might push you to more often test with three cars or four cars, and maybe not always at the same circuit, and you can imagine the commitment there is in having all the completely separate equipment, telemetry and all the rest of it. So firstly, on the money side, I would like to say it isn't a question of... obviously the degree is different but even at the front, one is working very hard to try and make the maximum use of the budget available, and finishing off, I would say, people put it in different terms, but fundamentally everybody's got the same view that too much of the money that is generated, mainly through TV but through circuit exposure, advertising, whatever, is not going to the people who are putting on the show and spending money in order to put on the show. And whether that be Paul or Eddie Jordan or Williams, that's the thing that needs to be corrected and every team, whether it be at the front or the back, is waiting to see that to be corrected.

Q:
Is it close?

PH:
I've heard a lot of talk, but then I've heard that for at least the last year, so I'm waiting to see.

Q:
After the US Grand Prix, there was quite a lot of talk in the American press about Juan Pablo's drive-through penalty and why it occurred, why there was no opportunity for you to defend that. I wanted to know what the actual procedure is, what you are told, do you get any chance to defend a decision that's made? Under the heading of Rubens Barrichello subsequently saying that, yes, he did have some sort of gearbox problem, but that yes, it didn't involve Juan Pablo but that in another part of the race, somebody else got past because the gearbox baulked and he was slow going into the corner. That's a grey area. Do you guys get the chance to argue that grey area before the penalty is issued?

PH:
No, we don't. We saw on the TV screen that Juan Pablo had been put forward to the stewards, which would have been by the race director, Charlie Whiting, for investigation, but we do not have any opportunity to participate in that decision. The next thing we saw was that he had been given the drive-through penalty and you have to fulfil that penalty within the next three laps which obviously at a 1m 12s lap time at Suzuka (he means Indianapolis), particularly with my leg here, I don't think I would go hobbling off down to the race director. We don't have an open line to Charlie, so... It was a move obviously... Rubens said to me he thought he'd left enough room for Juan. It was a fairly aggressive move, there's no doubt about that and certainly ended up with Rubens off the track. The penalty, in effect... there were other circumstances that certainly damaged Juan's race position but certainly without that penalty, he probably would have come here still in a position to compete in the championship, so it was a championship-excluding decision. Of course I am going to be in the position that I think it was unnecessarily harsh but we've seen some pretty... I'm still flabbergasted that looking at what happened between Michael and Alonso at Silverstone was considered perfectly OK, where he literally crossed from one side of the track to the other and pushed Alonso completely off onto the grass at 200 mph and I'm amazed that that was considered perfectly OK and yet Ralf's action at Hockenheim wasn't. But then you could say well I would say that wouldn't I? So... Personally, I would say there is a reasonable variety of decision-making over driving incidents this year.

Q:
Patrick, do you find anything sinister in the fact that two incidents involving Juan Pablo and a Ferrari this year, the signal that's come up on the screen says 'incident involving car no 3', only your car? It always take two cars to make an incident in my experience?

PH:
We're all paranoid. We're told that we're all paranoid in this business, and the problem is that it's so easy to drop into that mode of thinking. It's not something that's a productive thing to argue, because you can't really get to any result. But certain events that involve Ferrari and the FIA particularly have amazed me in the past and certain ones that I know quite a lot of inside information about have flabbergasted me. I've got a good respect, a strong respect for Charlie Whiting. But, meanwhile, he's not necessarily always his own master. Sometimes he has a difficult path to run but I'm not going to get myself into any more trouble than that.

Q:
Question for Peter Sauber. Has Felipe actually signed a contract with you yet for next year. It hasn't been announced yet officially.

PSa:
Yeah, not yet.

Q:
But he's definitely driving for you?

PSa:
Yes.

Q:
Yesterday, Heinz-Harald referred to your 'new manufacturer' in the press conference. Can you clarify that?

PSa:
I heard that, yes. But which new manufacturer? Volkswagen for example? No. I don't know why he said that.

Q:
Patrick and Geoff, over the years we have heard stories that Jacques Villeneuve could be difficult to work with, that he didn't have the right attitude that he didn't fit in the team. I don't know if those are true or not. At Indianapolis, Jacques said 'ask the guys I work with, they will tell you I give 100 percent and there is a lot of respect within the immediate team, my engineers, my mechanics and me?' Could you enlighten us one way or the other?

PH:
Well, I have to say Geoff's the right one to reply. It is a long time ago since we worked with Jacques, obviously the end of 1998. I think to us his best year was 1996, when he was very individual, willing to try quite different set-ups that sometimes he provoked and remember he jolly nearly won the world championship in his first year in Formula One. He jolly nearly, but for an oil leak, won his first ever Grand Prix. I think he is a great driver, there is no doubt about that. In 1997, I think he had really a reasonably better car than Michael. In my view he made it unnecessarily hard to win the championship and certainly if I had said to Jacques 'I think you are running a little bit too stiff, I think you should look at softening the car up a bit, Jacques would look over at Jock and say 'I want to go stiffer tomorrow'. It was perverseness, really. He is quite a perverse fellow and his attitude is 'I'll show you I can do it my way'. Whether he had learned to be a bit wiser in his older years I don't know, but I think he made bloody hard work of winning the world championship in 1997. Meanwhile he is a very talented, very fast driver, and why he has had such a difficult time this year I really don't know and I'd rather hand over to Geoff now.

Geoff Willis:
Yes, Jacques is certainly a very robust character. I have very much enjoyed working with him over the last two years and I think in character very similar to how he was back in 1996 and 1997. I think he is a person who's quite a private person and can therefore seem to be quite distant, quite assertive outside but within a small group of people I think he is great, he is very open. In terms of his technical input he is very observant, spends a lot of time thinking about what has happened to the car, particularly during the race. He figuratively thinks on his feet, he is inclined to be his own man, in the way he wants to set the car up and the way he wants to operate. Possibly for that a little excessively difficult, but over the years I think he had actually become a better driver, certainly he was a lot better in the wet and a lot better in adversity. This year, it is difficult to say why he struggled so much. Certainly the team didn't help him in some areas with our reliability and earlier on in the year we let him down a number of times but he certainly has always tried very hard, he has always given a huge amount of commitment to his racing. I think probably he was an even more rounded driver just recently than he was in the days that he was winning the championship.

Q:
Patrick, I am interested in Juan Pablo, particularly at the start of a Grand Prix. Does he sometimes get a bit of a red mist on. Indianapolis wasn't a particularly calm start and looking back at Montreal as well where he dropped it in the final chicane earlier on in the race. Is that something that you are aware of? Does he calm down as the Grand Prix goes on or am I just imagining it?

PH:
Well, he is a fairly determined character. Whether one describes that as 'red mist' I don't know, but I think at Indianapolis it doesn't help if your drivers don't get good starts and I think up to Hockenheim I think our starts were extremely competitive. Since then they have been average to poor and I think probably it means others have moved on in that area faster than we have and I think at Hungary we were whatever we were - second and third or something on the grid - but we were fourth and sixth going into the first corner and we were eighth and eighteenth coming round at the end of the first lap. We had said to the drivers 'whatever you do on the first corner, do not end up on the outside because everybody who has done has slid off the track' and sure enough both of our drivers ended up nearly running into each other both on the outside of the track. You would have to say that I don't think they are thinking when they are coming up to the first corner 'I must remember what Patrick Head told me'. But Juan is a very determined driver and you get what you get and you get races like Monaco and Hockenheim and sometimes you get judgements and equally on overtaking manoeuvres the difference between people turning around and grinning and clapping and them saying 'what an idiot' is wafer thin in this business and you have got to take the differences and yep, I think maybe the overtaking manoeuvre on Rubens was a bit opportunistic but he could see Michael ahead and that was his problem, Michael pulling away from him. Rubens did leave a gap but in truth it wasn't a big enough gap.

Q:
I think the reason we had the qualifying session on Friday this year was to try to improve the show on Friday. Is there unanimous agreement that the proposals for next year will make the show worse on Friday and if that is the case is that important anyway?

PH:
Friday will certainly be important to us because obviously we are told in normal circumstances that if it is dry on Friday we have got to choose our tyre by nine o'clock on Saturday morning which is obviously deliberately positioned to make us run on Friday. We have to install our race engine by Friday morning by the start of practice so obviously we are putting miles on the race engine so I imagine people will be running maybe restricted revs, maybe some restricted distances. But we have got to choose our brake cooling, engine cooling, all of which affect the performance of the car on Friday. It's a very interesting day for us, it is no less interesting for us, in fact next year Friday is probably more interesting for us but it is probably more difficult to write a story about, I would say. But on the other hand, how much of a story do you write about the one-lap qualifying on Friday now?

Q:
What about the first hour when the track is dirty?

PH:
Yep, it will obviously be more difficult for everybody with a dusty, dirty track if they are not well cleaned with a little rubber on them. I am not sure where this 'roadsweepers' thing came from, I think it was Ron actually that..

PSt:
Absolutely Ron.

PH:
We'll blame Ron, since he's not here. But we will have to do that ourselves, obviously.

PSt:
I think it is really sad. I think we have lost a part of the show on Friday, I think those of you who are writing stories for Saturday had something to talk about on a Friday. For me, our best moment of the season was Friday in Magny Cours and it went out as the lead story on the six o'clock night news in Holland. I can't believe we have just had it taken away. There was nothing wrong with the format and it has been changed for what is yet to be explained to me as a good reason.

Q:
Does Formula One as an industry, in terms of television revenue and everything else, make money from Fridays?

PSt:
I see Patrick shaking his head but there were some figures presented in the Formula One commission meeting last week that showed certainly in the UK it was important. The viewing figures were there. ITV, I believe, took it every Friday and showed it on the Friday evening. The marketing figures said yes, so it is a very strange one.

GW:
It didn't take very long this year to realise there wasn't a big penalty if you didn't qualify well on Friday as long as you weren't in the first five out on Saturday and I am fairly sure that during the year various people ran certain amounts of fuel to make it slightly harder for their competitors to see exactly where they were and it was always the case that Friday afternoon qualifying was never the same as qualifying was last year, when people went as fast as the car will go. And I think that always left a certain amount of doubt, certainly from the technical point of view. You had good confidence in what your fuel level was but you didn't assume that everyone else was empty either...

PSt:
Guys, that's what we tried to do. We tried to liven it up and they have taken it all away now.

GW:
But for Saturday it is a different thing. But then again, by the end of the race, we can on Sunday... we can work out what everybody qualified on anyway.

OA:
In my mind the race promoters and the sponsors have been involved in the decision and there has been no opposition from them. I have to believe that they are really the people who should understand. I don't think really the teams can take a strong position in this matter.

Q:
Williams had a problem with the fuel rigs at Indianapolis and I think that pretty much all of you have had a problem with the rig at one stage or another. The problem for us is that when we go to talk to the teams they say it is because of a faulty FIA rig and when we go to talk to Charlie Whiting he says in every case it is down to operator error. Are you satisfied with the fuel rigs and if not what should be improved?

PH:
I think the proof is somewhere between the two. There certainly have been problems that have been rig induced and those problems have been corrected and that correction has been provided to every team. I am certainly aware that there was a software problem earlier this season but the problem we had at Indianapolis was self-induced so Charlie is half right. And half wrong.

GW:
I think our only rig problem this year was in fact self-induced. I think over the years we have not been completely happy with the regs. We have eventually evolved to a point that we are happy. Whether all the time and expense and effort of doing that engineering has actually been worth it I am not sure.

PS:
I believe we had one problem this season with refuelling our car. We are more or less happy. I think it is the same for everybody.

Q:
Patrick, you spent years trying to build the fastest cars as Formula One was about building fast cars. Then for the last seven or eight years you have been trying to restrict the speed of the cars because of the regulations. Now because the regulations can't be squeezed, much more time is being squeezed. Is it very, very frustrating from a philosophical point of view for an engineer not being able to build fast cars any more?

PH:
Well, the regulations have been changed to slow the cars down during my time in Formula One and I suppose it probably started at the end of 1982 to ban, if you like, what were referred to as ground effect cars, although they probably weren't that much more ground effect than they are now. So slowing cars down has been around for an awful long time and whether it be by reducing the tyre width and putting grooves on the tyres and changing the aerodynamics, Equally during that time there have been some enormous improvements in the construction of the cars and the safety aspects which I would have to say to some extent the drivers then move towards using. It is not a deliberate activity but their confidence level and the assurance that the car gives makes them maybe perform manoeuvres that they would not have done 20 years ago. When the formula was changed, I think when we were running unrestricted turbos we were in the sort of 850 to 900 horsepower mark for racing condition and then the turbos became restricted with restricted boost and then there was a change to normally aspirated and I think that a DFR was 600 horsepower and there was some thought that nobody would produce much more than 650 out of a 3.5 litre normally aspirated and now we are at roughly around the 900 mark from a three litre. So obviously with that huge change of horsepower there has had to be quite a few changes to the technical specification of the cars in order to even contain performance to the level it has been.

Q:
But it's like being a trained athlete. You spent years training up to run the fastest possible and now you are being told you can only use one leg.

PH:
Yes, but motor racing is an artificial activity. If we were running on restricted rules, you know, we would probably have to spend two hours getting the driver into his G-suit or something before qualifying. So I don't find it surprising. The only thing, and it obviously is being debated at the moment, is the point at which it is felt the cars get excessively emasculated in order to maintain lap times when maybe the major driving thing is the very technically impressive improvements in engine performance.

GW:
It is a very good question because you can say an awful lot about this but just to add on rather than cover the same ground as Patrick, engineering is all about resource management. If you remember the old definition of an engineer: An engineer is the person who can do for a pound what any fool can do for ten and we have always had resource limitations, whether it is money, time, material properties, whatever. So it doesn't really matter what the regulations are, there is still an engineering challenge, you are competing against others in an arbitrary set of regulations. But they may be no more arbitrary than the budget you have got as an architect or something like that. So I don't really mind what regulations we have. Clearly from a safety point of view it is easier to control the cars than it is to re-design circuits. We have got to get the balance between technological interest and competition and television spectacle. The only problem we have is trying to come up with a set of technical regulations that avoids typecasting the cars and it is quite difficult at the moment the way we have evolved the regulations by more and more small restrictive steps that is suspect if you painted all the cars exactly the same colour and you all asked yourselves honestly, could you actually recognise which car was which? And that is our biggest challenge in the technical working group. We keep skating around it. How do we come up with a clever set of regulations that don't force the solution to be almost identical, keeps the competitiveness, keeps the finance under control and maintains the safety. It's something I don't think we have solved yet but we continue to talk about it.

Q:
After so much serious discussion, can each of you forecast the results for the championship? It is not a debate, it is just a nice game that looks good in the papers!

OA:
Well, I suppose the championship is pretty clear and I am very interested to see the manufacturers and if I give you a name I hope Williams will win to constructors.

Q:
So you are saying Michael Schumacher and Williams?

OA:
Yes, that is what I am saying.

PH:
I think Michael Schumacher will win the drivers' championship but I think Kimi Raikkonen has had a fantastic season and has driven extremely well. And I think Williams will win the constructors' championship.

GW:
It is a difficult one. If you are talking about who you would like to win the championship I must say I think I would have liked to see Juan Pablo win it. He is a very open character with a competitive nature...

Q:
But who do you think will win it?

GW:
I think it will be Michael winning the drivers', um, and I would like to think my old team (Williams) has a good chance of winning the constructors'.

PSt:
Michael will win the drivers' and I would like to think that Williams could win the constructors' but I think it will be Ferrari.

PSa:
I think Michael will win the championship for drivers and the other one is open.

Q:
You wouldn't be sitting on the fence would you?

(Laughter)

Q:
Patrick, for the reasons you explained earlier the 48 days' testing rule rather than the 48 days' car testing rule means that the cost for testing next year could be exactly the same as this year or even more expensive because of the logistics.

PH:
Um, you are not forced to test at different tracks at the same time and that obviously adds to costs in terms of personnel and equipment but equally there is no limitation, I believe, I haven't seen any limitation on the number of cars you run. So I don't see it at this stage as a restriction on what has existed this year.

Q:
So isn't it rank lunacy that the great and the good, the powerbrokers, and that includes the teams and team bosses, have got together and decided the format for next year and I understood one of the criteria was to save money, and you have come up with something that isn't going to save money. Well, it won't. Ferrari will spend exactly the same as they do now won't they?

PH:
Well, fundamentally Ferrari, as was discussed earlier, are extremely influential in this business and they are the people that have said that they will not accept a limitation on testing and more than restricting the current situation of five days following a Grand Prix down to four days which takes us to something over 48 days. And when something has to be agreed unanimously and one team says I am not even prepared to discuss this because I am not prepared to discuss a limitation on testing then there isn't much point in taking it an awful lot further, is there?

Q:
If I could actually ask all five of you, because you were in the meeting when the decisions were taken, I think. How does this improve Formula One?

PSt:
It doesn't. It simply doesn't. It doesn't save money. It destroys the advantage the small teams had and it is not going to help. And it wasn't really unanimous either.

PSa:
For us it will be the same as this season because we have about 34 or 36 test days so it will make no difference for us whether we can test 48 days.

OA:
We are all in favour of reducing the testing to try to save money but as Patrick was saying we have to be unanimous and there isn't the possibility to get a unanimous agreement on this issue so that is why we have the situation we have.

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