By Huw Alban
July 25 2002

The UK television station ITV has managed to glean a quote from Tom Walkinshaw that goes some way to explaining why Arrows acted deliberately so that they didn’t have to compete in the French Grand Prix last weekend. As ever it comes down to money. ITV, in their French Grand Prix coverage, revealed that the team would have saved a substantial amount of money by not taking part in the four free practice sessions. The TV station estimated that Arrows saved in the region of £300,000 by choosing not to run on Friday and Saturday, and it now appears that money was the prime concern for the team last weekend. It has emerged that saving money was not the team’s aim, but avoiding big bills for repairs was.

Arrows had been advised that if there was an incident on track then another legal battle would emerge as to who would pay for it. “The legal advice is that we cannot do anything that substantially alters the financial situation of the team until this thing is negotiated and resolved,” Tom Walkinshaw said to ITV. “If we had gone out and crashed like Jordan did then we would just have written off 750,000 pounds and there would have been a big fight about who would be paying for that.”

Case solved?