By Phil Huff (09/07/2004)
July 9 2004

Lucky Strike BAR Honda's technical chief Geoff Willis took part in the Friday Five press conference today, giving some of the most exhaustive answers to have come out of F1. Here's what he had to say. Geoff, I believe you had a new aero package on cars today. Tell us about it?

We have a number of developments which we tested last week at Jerez and we will be testing again next week at the Jerez test. It's quite difficult at this time of the year because we are just about to come to the big testing ban, so we are trying to get as many pieces on the car right at the moment. But we need to be really careful. It's often the case that if you rush new components onto a car that aren't properly tested then you tend to go backwards rather than make an improvement. So we will be a bit cautious. Today, it's not been a particularly good day for us and I think we may well just keep a bit more logical and save the parts for the test at Jerez when we’ve got proper time to evaluate them.

What about Jenson Button today, what do you feel about his performance?

Generally we were reasonably happy with the car but we're not as happy as we were at the test here a short while ago. We've got some more work to do, I think.

After the Technical Working Group meeting earlier this week, what was the outcome, where is it going next, what are the problems, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals? What happens next?

The technical working group was asked to find a way of reducing the performance of the cars and the key thing for me was that we established that our target was to reduce the performance of the cars back to the lap times we had in 2002/2003 so essentially, about a three seconds a lap reduction in performance. And the Technical Working Group looking at specifically the chassis regulations and the aerodynamic regulations have come up with, unanimously, with a set of proposals that we believe will slow the cars down by 1.5s/1.75s per lap, maybe a little bit less if there is some improvement over the winter. The tyre proposals, even though not fully agreed yet, are clearly able to slow the cars down by 1.5s to 2s so I believe that we have done what is required and we can move on quite quickly. And what is most critical is that we get this agreement that we have met the requirements that have come from the World Council to the Technical Working Group and we can just get a set of regulations from which we can carry on designing the cars and that it is fixed in the next few weeks because none of the teams can afford this to be left undone any longer and I believe that we've done what's required.

Just to follow on from that, in the last race Ferrari had to change pit-stop strategy because they were not sure that Michael could actually overtake Alonso on the track. In the last 17 laps we had three cars heading nose-to-tail and, yes, there was overtaking, but that was more by quirk of circumstances. I am not saying we want Formula One like Basketball with a lead change every three seconds but what can we do on the car side to maybe make overtaking just a little bit more easy?

There are two ways you can improve this. The easiest way, which is actually the most expensive way, is to look at the circuit layout. A lot of the circuit layouts do not lend themselves to overtaking at all. The other issue to consider is how the cars are differentiated. If we all end up with roughly the same engine, roughly the same aerodynamic characteristics and the same engine characteristics there is very little to differentiate the performance of the cars to give advantage to one car on one type of circuit and to another type of car on another type of circuit and therefore, taking Mike’s point, if you line up in performance order after qualifying then why do you expect overtaking? So we are trying to make overtaking and if that is what we think makes the spectacle then we are going to have to tackle both the circuit layout and to think of a set of technical rules that doesn't end up with a single type of car that is indistinguishable apart from its colour scheme.

What is the point of view concerning the engines? Is there an opposition against the 2.4 V8? Would you all rather have the V10?

I can think of two points here. I think speaking on Honda's behalf I think they are very happy to take the technical challenge with any set of technical regulations and therefore, for them, what they would like to have is a clear definition of what the target is and their engineers will compete to reach that target. We need to be a little bit careful, there are quite clear reasons why we need to get the engine power down and this is one way of doing it. But we have to be a bit careful at how we introduce it, whether the 2.4 V8 is the right thing to do for 2006, what it is going to do for second teams for engine suppliers, it is not trivial and there is quite a lot of cost implication in it. It is not a trivial thing. I think from a purely engineering point of view it is an interesting thing and Honda will happily compete.

BAR have made a huge improvement this year. Of course, it didn't happen overnight but can you just talk us through what has happened to the team to take if from where it was to being a regular podium contender?

Yes, we have made quite big changes everywhere. If we start in the team itself, the people, the way it is organised, back in 2002 we identified we needed to make some quite big operational changes, quite clear personnel changes, organisational changes and put in a much more sort of structured approach to the whole business of Formula One. We weren't the team with the highest resources, we weren't the team with the most money, but felt that with what we had we could do a lot better. On top of that we have also built a new technical team, design and manufacturing group, and we have tackled the very fundamental issues of racing car design – making it very light, making the aerodynamics work effectively. Honda have looked at their own engine programme, reorganised their programme, their engineers, made clear lines of responsibility and clear plans and BAR and Honda together have developed their relationship so there is much more understanding and trust and confidence between the two companies and essentially become much more professional Formula One partners. And I guess if you look at the difference of why the car performs very well this year, it is fundamentally that we have got the basics right – we have got a very lightweight chassis, we have got, we believe, a good understanding of what makes a car good aerodynamically, what sort of things we are looking for in the wind tunnel. Honda came to 2004 with a completely new engine, much smaller, much lighter, we have new technology, or existing technology that we have introduced in terms of our carbon composite gear case and our new gearbox internals, which are developed with Honda and BAR together, and we have just looked at every single area. And on top of that it is just our organisation. Our drivers work together, our race team works, our factory works, there is not a single thing that we need to improve, we have just looked at absolutely everything. The challenge for us now is to repeat that level performance again next year and we have to improve by an amount relative to the improvements that the rest of the teams are making, so it is quite a challenge.

There is talk of more races and less testing in the future. What would you find acceptable as a minimum amount of testing that you would be allowed to do if there was a further reduction in testing?

If I answer this from a sort of narrow technical perspective, the issue is a significant amount of our performance improvement this year has come from much, much more testing and it is significant - probably in our case over 50 percent, maybe nearly 60 percent, of our testing is tyres but also a significant amount of reliability testing. So it is really important to us and my concern is that as, rightly, we wish to cut down on a lot of the costs which we would do by reducing testing, the only other solution would be to go to factory-based rigs, which in the end would be considerably more expensive and I am sure that the very well-funded teams, or the most well-funded teams, are already making those sorts of investments. So it would actually put us at a disadvantage. In order to save money, we would either have to spend more money or be at a disadvantage. Probably the only way we can reduce our demand on the testing is by reducing our demands on tyre testing. If that was the case then during the season I think we can afford a reasonably reduced amount of testing as long as we maintain unregulated testing earlier in the season for the cars for safety's sake.

After the French Grand Prix David Richards said that even he didn't believe that there was no difference between the driving style of his two drivers which could affect the reliability of their engines and I think Sato actually wracked up number six this year. Have you had any further thoughts on that? Is there something in his driving that affects the reliability of his engine compared to Jenson?

The issue is that in testing, the amount of extensive testing and driving that Takuma has done, he has had very much the same level of engine-related problems that the other two drivers have had. So intrinsically, in his driving style there doesn't seem to be any reason why you could assume there was any connection between Takuma's driving and the engine problems. And generally on a race weekend we have had virtually no engine-related problems on Friday and Saturday so if there is a connection it is between Takuma and race day and certainly this hasn't escaped us. We are looking at all the things we do on a race day to see if there is anything that is different between the cars that might not so much contribute to the engine problem but make it more likely for the first engine problem to happen with Takuma rather than Jenson. The faults are not all the same, some of them have been similar, but there have been a number of different faults and it is surprising that we have generally had really quite high reliability, particularly in testing, but we have got this run of problems with Takuma and it is very high priority for both BAR and Honda to try to find what is driving these problems and find a solution to them. The failure from France, the engines have had their tear-down in Japan, we are still not happy that we understand... we understand physically which part's failed but we don't have an understanding why it failed. We have made some very careful selections of batched components for this weekend and we have also made some changes in operating procedures between the two racecars to try and make sure we take out any other possible things that we are doing which are somehow making these problems occur earlier on in Takuma's car.