By Phil Huff
September 16 2007

Nick Fry, Honda Racing F1's Chief Executive Officer, sat through the 'Friday Five' press conference yesterday. With the WMSC's verdict against McLaren having been handed down just hours earlier, the espionage saga obviously dominated proceedings. Here's what Nick had to say... Your reaction to the hearing yesterday and the penalty, and also your reaction if you’ve read the final judgement published today. We were just joking outside that you were going to ask us that question because I think it (the final judgement) was released when we were all sitting on the pit wall, so we suspect most of the audience have read it and we haven’t, unless Flavio read it while he was on the pit wall, so we have not seen it. I think it’s very difficult to speak about the judgement itself. My personal perspective is that it’s good that McLaren are racing. I think from the Formula One point of view it would be extremely disappointing for all of us if a competitor of that calibre was missing from the grid, so I think that’s the good news. I think we all hope that this is the end of it. Obviously there’s a danger it won’t be but I think we would be better off focusing on the sport, the entertainment, getting the rules right to help that, getting the engine rules worked out and getting on with life. I hope it doesn’t continue to perpetuate. What about the size of the penalty? McLaren are very rich, I guess. If somebody hit you with that penalty? I don’t think I’d be sitting here. I read a comment in a newspaper today that $100m for a normal human being is a huge sum of money, probably not for Formula One teams. You are representing five teams. What is $100m for you as a team? What would happen if you lost $100m? I think in Formula One, because the numbers are big, sometimes people talk about millions as if it’s trivial. I can assure you, certainly in our team and I suspect in all the others, the budgets are worked out very carefully, we try and allocate the money as effectively as possible and $100m is a vast amount of money for any of the teams, I believe. The results of having to pay that, if it was actually cash, would be very significant. It would mean that we would have to find it elsewhere or whatever. I don’t really know… It’s not happened to us and I hope it never will but it’s a vast amount of money even by Formula One standards. Given what you know about the McLaren case, if one of the McLaren drivers goes on to win the Drivers’ Championship will that title be tainted in any way? It would have been, in my view, extremely destructive and almost vindictive to penalise the drivers. I think that we can easily slip into self-destruct mode here of trying to ruin everything. I think we’ve got a great Drivers’ championship, it’s being fought out on a very even basis between those drivers and I believe the decision was exactly right to leave them out of it. I can see the point, I can see the purist’s point of view, but I think it was a very sensible decision in my view. We are talking always about the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship. How would you draw the line between the importance between the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship? If I put my corporate hat on I think I would agree with Mario [that the Constructors' Championship is more important]. Obviously for a car manufacturer to win the Constructors’ Championship is immensely important. It can be used in advertising… But if I speak from the heart and as a fan I would say sport is about people and I think it is about, for most of us, the Drivers’ Championship and if I had to rank one of them as the top one, I think for most people it would be the Drivers’ Championship. You are the top manager in your organisation and those organisations have grown very big over the last few years. Obviously the top managers at Ferrari and McLaren clearly weren’t aware of what was going on to cause the incident that was going to happen. To what extent has this been a kind of cautionary tale for you? And have you changed anything in your systems to make sure that you would know if something like this were to happen within your team? Certainly the laws in the UK are very clear. You are responsible for the actions of your employees. An exception might be called if someone is extremely reckless or goes out on their own agenda. The law caters for that as well. There isn’t anything specifically that we are planning to do at the moment. We think we are well covered in this area. It is something that can get checked very rigorously as part of the auditing process. I think our internal processes are pretty strong in that area but it does show how difficult it is, and I do somewhat sympathise with Ron [Dennis], when you have an organisation that big, to know what is going on right through is pretty difficult. But then that is why you have a management structure. But obviously you have to rely on people feeding things to you. It is difficult, but if you have an organisation of 20,000 people the same rules apply and there is no reason why we should be an exception. I have found, I can say, a controversial version about the Constructors’ and Drivers’ Championships. I mean before you said it was correct the penalisation of yesterday, even if those guys used the car with an illegal advantage. But at the end you said that this championship is a drivers’ championship, they are the star. So I mean the people around the tracks don’t know exactly what happened yesterday. I mean they can think that nothing happened yesterday because the drivers were not penalised. I would like to know your opinion about it and Nick I would like to know if you agree with Ron Dennis that the two guys, Coughlan and Nigel Stepney, wanted to use the information in some other team? I mean they were in contact with your team.   The documentation from our contact with Stepney and Coughlan was offered to the teams involved and the FIA. The FIA’s response was a very nice letter from Max [Mosley] saying that he didn’t really think it was really relevant. The information was provided by me on personal request by Ron Dennis and it wasn’t used at all or mentioned. And I can only assume it wasn’t because it had no relevance. As we have always said they were perfectly ordinary interviews and nothing inappropriate was either offered or said. So on the pure facts I can only say nothing was asked for, nothing was offered or proposed. I can only guess like you, I think it probably would have been very nice having a lot of documentation in the upstairs bedrooms, so you could come to a new team and become a hero. If we would have known that information was there we would have taken the appropriate action. And certainly we would not countenance anything like that in our team. But I can only guess like you. If you work backwards to your first question… I understand that point of view, the difference between the drivers and the constructors… but I stand by what I said earlier. I think it was the right decision to leave the drivers to their own championship.