By Phil Huff (12/06/2004)
June 12 2004

Otmar Szafnauer, Honda Racing Development's Vice President, took part in the traditional Friday Five conference at Montreal, talking about updates, reliability, Taku, qualifying, and a B-spec BAR-Honda. Here's the transcript of what he said... Otmar, first of all updates. What is the programme for you, because I think it has changed here, hasn’t it?

This year our plan was to have fewer updates and more significant ones. Our first one was at Imola, the second one is here and that is still the case. We have brought more power and our engine is a bit more fuel efficient here as well, we have been working on that. The next update was planned for Hockenheim but with our recent performance we are not winning races so we are trying to bring that forward by a race to Silverstone, so you may see the next significant step at Silverstone after this.

I got the impression that this was going to be a performance update here but it has more become a reliability one.

It was always planned as a performance update and that is what it is. However, after the last Grand Prix we had to re-evaluate reliability and we have made some changes to address our failure in Takuma’s engine. So you could say it is both, but the performance advancements that we had planned all along are in this engine and they were tested at Silverstone and Monza.

What has been the problem? Is it a Takuma problem, because he has had four major failures this year?

Absolutely not, it’s the luck of the draw really. We have spent a lot of time analysing the data on both drivers and there is nothing to point at one driver versus the other. It’s not driving style, it’s just circumstances of the race and those are different so it is not a Takuma problem, per se.

Can you blame, then, for example, the last two failures have been a lap or two after a pit stop and a re-start.

The re-start definitely had something to do with it but both engines in Monaco saw the same type of data, so to speak, after the re-start and it was just unfortunate for Takuma that his engine didn’t last. We saw high temperatures on both engines and we had every expectation that both engines were going to finish that race. Unfortunately Takuma didn’t and Jenson finished second. The last failure was completely different, so you can’t really correlate it to those types of things.

In the year and a half you have been working with Takuma Sato, tell us how he has matured and gotten better and faster because he seems to have come a long way here?

Well, Takuma did a very good job for us testing last year and in that year he got a lot of miles or kilometres under his belt. Even in this season, as we can all tell, he’s improving and his attitude has always been very good. He works very hard and he’s a racing car driver. He wants to win and he and (race engineer) Jock (Clear) are a good pairing and they are doing very well. I think, with time, just like anybody else Takuma will continue to improve.

It looks like the qualifying rules are going to change back again for Silverstone and one of the major factors people were talking about was improving the show. What’s your opinions on that?

Well, we at Honda have really enjoyed the low fuel all-out performance runs in the past. We look forward to having that back. I’m not sure how the aggregate’s going to work but we shall see.

Given that McLaren and Toyota are producing a B-spec car this year and Williams are producing an aero upgrade and Honda has brought a big engine improvement here, do you think it is a growing trend that we are seeing teams developing almost two specs of car in a season or do you think it is just a one-off this year because the cars that were brought out were under-performing at the start of the year?

With us it is not an all-new engine, it is just a significant step this time and we will continue to make those steps when we have the technology to put in the engine and bring out engines with more power. We aren’t winning and we will continue to push until we realise our want and our wishes and that is to win the world championship.