By Phil Huff
June 9 2007

Jacky Eecklaert, Honda Racing F1's Engineering Director, spent Friday afternoon with the assembled media in Montreal, chatting about the future direction of Formula One, what's gone wrong for Honda in 2007, and just who is better - Rubens or Jenson? Here's a transcript of everything he had to say, so read on and find out the answer.

Obviously this year's engines have been homologated, their specification basically frozen. I wonder if you can give some indication of how you feel your specific engines are performing in comparison to the competition?

It's not only the limiting of the engine revs – of course, that is the factor that has been used in the past to increase the power of the engine – but also the stopping of all development of the internals of the engine, because you could imagine, let's say, rpm is limited to 19,000 but development allowed for the inside of the engine, which could lead maybe to different coatings, reducing friction which is then increasing horsepower, reducing bearing size by using different materials but all that has also been stopped. So I think, honestly, all the engines are very close to each other in terms of performance.

Very interesting to see the difference between Barrichello and Button, because Rubens really seems to be outperforming Jenson in many areas so far this year.

I think normally in qualifying and in the race their lap times are very, very close, which probably means that they are both pulling out the very last thing from the cars. But maybe, as you said, initially when we started testing in November with the old car on Bridgestone tyres, Rubens felt a bit more confident than Jenson on these tyres. I think Rubens drove on Bridgestones for a lot of years and they must have similar characteristics to what he’s used to, but at the end, I think, for the moment, they both do similar performances with the cars.

So even though in straight statistics it seems Rubens is outperforming Jenson, they are very close.

They are very close, yeah.

You had some problems at the beginning of the season with stability; is that being overcome now?

Well, let's say that it's true that we had and still have problems of performance, for sure, but we had problems of braking stability, which was basically an aerodynamic problem of the car and we have understood now what was wrong. So we have a clear development programme and this braking stability has been solved now, so this aerodynamic problem has been solved, so that now we can go on doing the standard development of the car which is basically looking for more downforce and less drag, and more efficiency.

So we should see the sort of form that was shown in Monaco being shown in future races now.

Well yes, we have a continuous development programme with different steps that is very clear, and of course, at this race we run a car that is very similar to the Monaco car, apart from front and rear wings because there's a different downforce level. But then there is a next step coming on for Magny-Cours and another step for a few races later and so on, so there are still different steps coming on until the end of the season.

You have seen the outlines of the rule proposals for 2011, what do you think of them? Is Formula One heading in the right direction with these rules?

Firstly we support most of the drafted regulations. I think it will push the manufacturers to build more fuel-efficient engines because probably the fuel flow will be needed. So if you want to go faster with a given amount of fuel in a given amount of time then you need to make a very fuel-efficient engine and this will probably find some spin-offs in the road cars sooner or later. On the other hand of course Honda supports the environmental position of the FIA. Especially in the case of the hybrid technology which also will be the case in 2012.

The performance of the different types of tyre that have been brought along this weekend, obviously the soft and the super-soft. Looking at the practice today, what have we learned? Is the soft tyre the better race tyre and the super-soft quicker on a single lap as we saw in Monaco or is there a variability in that picture?

What we can say is that these are the same tyres as in Monaco, the soft and the super-soft and it depends on the track conditions. This morning the track was extremely green, I think everybody had problems with turning even with the prime tyre which is soft, not to speak about the super-soft. The track evolution changes the way you can use a tyre. So if it is not raining, or not too much, we will have another track evolution I think on Saturday morning and from there on we will see and we will have to take a decision.

We today saw one of your competitors, namely Toyota, having some problems with the front suspension. Could you just talk in general about how easy or hard it is to fix these kinds of problems and whether you see a chance that we might not see a Toyota on the race track tomorrow and on Sunday?

I think that if the suspension breaks within a window of load switches then it is really something that has to be considered very seriously because as Willy says you cannot redesign or reinforce the suspension on the track. It is very difficult because you have to validate the parts. But of course we don’t know what happened. Maybe he hit the wall the lap before or a few corners before and this put a big load on, for which the suspension is not designed? Then it fails the next time you go over the kerb. It is possible but we do not know that.

You said you have identified the problems that you faced at the start of the season. Could you tell us some more details?

Well it is difficult for me to give too much detail for obvious reasons but for sure we have quite a competitive car at the end of 2006. The second half of the season and I think at the end of the season, the two fastest cars on Michelin tyres were the Renault and the Honda. We were clearly in front of the McLaren the last few races of the season. Then five weeks later after the last Grand Prix when we went testing with them with the new Bridgestone tyre, we had lost quite a lot of performance by switching tyres. This was difficult to anticipate as the tyre became available for all the teams on the same day at the end of October. The interaction of the tyre with the car is a very complex thing, not just mechanically but also aerodynamically. But I think the details from that, now that we understand it, are within our scope.