Username
Password
Britain: Ross Brawn talks at Silverstone
By Phil Huff July 5 2008
Honda Racing F1's team chief, Ross Brawn, sat in on the Friday press conference at Silverstone and, as always, listening to what he had to say proved interesting and insightful. Here's the complete transcript, where he talks of KERS, saving money, Donington Park and much more.

There has been a letter from the FIA to all the constructors regarding the rules and the course of the regulations. What are your thoughts on that letter?

I think the important thing about the letter is that it states that the teams can get together to write the rules for the future. If the teams can agree on the future direction of F1 that is the best solution. I think to prejudge what that direction should be, we are all reasonable judges of what is good for our business, we know we want to reduce costs if possible, we know we want to make it more entertaining and improve safety, so there’s lots of common objectives and if the teams can genuinely get together to find solutions to improve the show, reduce costs, etc. I think we would be very happy with that. I think what is important is to have the confidence that when we come up with those objectives they are understood and supported by the FIA, otherwise the process is a waste of time. I am very optimistic that this is an opportunity for us to work together as teams to find solutions which are good for the future.

Today there was a statement from the FIA and FOM about the future of the British Grand Prix. Your thoughts on that please.

The most important thing is that we maintain the British Grand Prix because we are under huge competition from circuits like Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, these new countries that want a grand prix. It is just very good news that we will keep it in Britain, but a little bit sad that we are losing it from Silverstone, especially as our company and our factory are so close.

Quite a few changes to your car. How have those manifested themselves over the last few days with the test here and the race weekend so far?

It is quite interesting as we have actually got a car which the drivers are quite happy with from a balance point of view. They can drive it well and it is reasonably consistent but in Magny-Cours we were just not quick enough. I think with the objectives and priorities of the team we have not had as an intense development programme this year as one would have in a normal season. Certainly not the intensity we hope to have in the future, so we have fallen behind a bit. We had these upgrades planned for a while and they will come over the next three races. The first is a new nose, front wing and some bodywork modifications. There are some further aerodynamic changes for Hockenheim and then we have a new rear suspension system for Hungary. I think that will be it for the rest of the season. We are pretty optimistic as always about these changes. I think we are seeing the benefit here of the first step of those changes, but I think it won’t be until we get to Budapest that we will have the whole package.

Was that one of your aims to accelerate the rate of development?

Well, we have grouped the development this year. Instead of having a trickle of things coming through we have had a couple of pockets or projects that we have done because I was very keen to make sure that we balance our priorities between this year and next year. We do have a low downforce package for Monza as all the teams will have but we are battling down the hatches on this car now and getting on with the future.

Do you think it is possible to make the sport cheaper to run given that it is so competitive and the teams are so close?

I think essentially budget capping was a nice solution as that really did reduce the costs. You have got X amount of money to spend and you can’t spend any more. You can’t argue with that logic. Our difficulty has always been in restricting the technical regulations or procedures, you close one gate and everything bolts through the other one that is still left open. We froze the engine and all that money was put into aerodynamics and other areas of the company. That’s the difficulty. In the purest sense, if we can constrain the amount of money that is available to teams, then costs will reduce. We don’t seem to have been able to find the solution with that, so I think we are going to explore the technical constraints or the operational constraints and see if there are solutions there.  But we have just got to be so careful that we do not leave any door even ajar that people could push open and pour all their resources into it. There is talk of restrictions on wind tunnels which is possibly a relatively easy thing to implement but if there are no restrictions on CFD, then teams will pour all their money into CFD facilities and nobody has explained to me so far how we can contain CFD. It is a very difficult thing to restrict. I can understand you can only have your wind tunnel turned on 12 hours a day but I can’t understand how it restricts CFD facilities. It is not an easy task, I agree with Martin, but there is a good spirit within the teams at the moment to try and find a solution.

You touched on the point about negotiations and it seems that the situation about the Concorde Agreement is more and more confusing for Formula One fans. Is there any clear message from the Formula One community regarding the Concorde Agreement negotiations in future?

I think if you feel it’s confusing for Formula One fans then it’s confusing for us as well. There’s still quite a long way to go.

Regarding costs, isn’t there a contradiction between wanting to reduce costs and increasing the number of Grands Prix at the same time? So what does an additional Grand Prix cost for you and also, there won’t be any summer break next season, and I remember Ron Dennis saying if there is no summer break it will be more complicated for mechanics because teams will need two sets of mechanics to tackle the season.

I think unfortunately we do tend to go round in circles and the August break was introduced as a means of genuinely giving everyone a rest in the middle of tough seasons. Now we want to expand the number of races and not do that, so we end up having to look at reserve squads and back-up mechanics and groups of people who can take over, so the others guys can get a rest. And without doing that, to have a whole race team that can’t take a holiday from what would effectively be February until November is not easy. It means we’re going to have to look at extra crews, extra people, so we can give people breaks. We’ve been through this before. I had the same discussion, came to a conclusion and those conclusions seem to have been forgotten again. So I think it’s a shame.

How come you are only harvesting energy from under braking? How come you are not going all the way? What’s the benefit of doing that, if you cannot harvest energy from every moment when the car is running?

Energy under braking is, to all intents and purposes, wasted energy. It’s energy we dissipate as heat primarily through the braking system, and therefore energy which, if we recover, is additional to the total energy. So we generate energy primarily with the engine and then we dissipate it through aerodynamic drag, friction and a lot of it through braking. I don’t know the exact percentages through braking, but quite a lot, and so we’re trying to recover some of the energy that we would have thrown away. The other sources of energy in the car: heat from the cooling system and heat from the exhaust system, and those are two areas which we’re going to look at in the future, to see if we can recover energy from those areas. But braking is the most obvious and it’s the philosophy as used in many systems throughout the world: trains, buses, all sorts of things recover energy under braking, store it and then re-introduce it in driving the vehicle.

You mentioned earlier on about being so close to the Silverstone circuit. As the European season shrinks and the bulk of the races are now moving further east, do you think that Formula One, as an industry, will tend to move with it in the long term?

Personally I don’t think so, no. I think there’s a very strong core of expertise, certainly within Britain and definitely within Europe, but there are areas of expertise all round the world we use now. Our power train is designed and developed in Japan. When I worked at Ferrari, they were funded and supported by TATA which was an Indian industrial corporation which actually genuinely provided quite a lot of resource to Ferrari. I think we’re very open to finding the resource and expertise we need all over the world. But the core racing experience tends to exist in Europe and particularly in Britain.

You talked earlier about the new grands prix coming on the scene. Do you feel they will set a yardstick for the British Grand Prix and others to follow and is it quite exciting, is that’s what’s needed?

I think several of the new circuits have raised the standards in terms of facilities, in terms of the quality of circuit. I think, for me personally, having been in racing a long time, it’s still nice to have a character to a circuit, to have a spirit about a circuit, and of course Silverstone has a lot of history, a lot of spirit. You remember the races in which you did well, did badly. I think Donington has a lot of racing heritage. The proposal is to build a facility or expand the facility in Donington which will be the match of anything else in the world, and that’s something which for us will be great; for Britain to have a Formula One facility which is comparable with anything in the world would be a great asset. I think it’s a good thing.

Bookmark or share this story with: