By Phil Huff
March 17 2006

Honda Racing F1's Geoffrey Willis, the team's technical director, took part in the 'Friday Five' press conference today, talking about Ferrari's wings, standard ECU's, and much more. It's all interesting, so here's everything he said... Geoff, you have a new driver this year in Rubens Barrichello. What has he brought to the team?

I think he brings a lot of experience of how to win. He's won nine races, I think. He's been with a championship-winning team for many years. Certainly, he strengthens our driver line-up hugely, and he brings that experience, that knowledge of what it feels like to win and makes us a stronger team, so it's been good working with him. Let's see how we do this weekend.

Does he tell you much about Ferrari?

Certainly, he's used to working in a slightly different environment, how they operate certain technical aspects of the car. The driver can often explain what the car feels like, the way he thinks it operates and other bits about the car, but generally the teams don't tell the drivers an awful lot about the cars that other teams might be interested in, so it's really just his experience, how he feels the car and how he wants to work on the car.

You have a third driver again, having not had one last year but having had one the year before that. Is it more of a benefit now than it was two years ago?

It's certainly very useful this year because, unlike in 2004, when we had just one engine to last just one race weekend, we have an engine to last two race weekends, so even more we are biasing the running on a Friday to the third driver. Anthony's been with the team for a long time, he's very quick, very consistent and our race drivers have got a lot of confidence in reading what he says about the car. So it's certainly very useful for us.

You certainly did a job with him today, getting him back out again at the end.

I'm not quite sure how the car came back so quickly, but we got a call from Charlie Whiting to say we would get it back so we were well prepared.

Was there any damage to it?

Only after I think the marshals got to it and they pushed it into the gravel, and we had quite a lot of gravel to take out of it which wasn't there when Anthony left it.

We're seeing fewer and fewer laps from the drivers on the Fridays; do you think there is a case for making Friday an unlimited test day?

I think it would be very difficult to make it a useable test day. Typically, on a test day, we are getting quite a lot of cars going round, we're running six or seven hours. We can probably achieve 500+ kilometres. It is also difficult coming to a race track, where usually there hasn't been anything on the circuit for at least a week, if not longer than that, so the circuit conditions are fairly poor on the first day. So I think there is not an awful lot that we would learn and part of the reason why a lot of the race drivers don't go out in the first session on Friday is just because the circuit conditions are not really very useful.

A general question on the testing agreement; could you clarify 1) if it's been signed and 2) what is consists of?

It's very similar to the testing agreement that was agreed by nine teams last year. The number of days is slightly more and there's a little bit of detail tidy-up about how you use... you can nominate your home circuit and on those conditions you can count for a half car day rather than if you use a single car on that track. So certain teams have circuits which they can only use one car on and so we've agreed that we can all nominate one circuit that allows you to count – if you only run one car on it – half a day. So in general I think it's pretty consistent. It gives a realistic target cap on distance per day, the number of days per year, so I think it's fairly well understood that it will keep us in a sensible position on testing. This is a question I've been asked to ask about the measurement of rear wings: is there another way of measuring rear wings, the flex that might appear, that you would want to see, that you would be happy with?

I'll have another go at it. The issue about the flexibility of rear wings is a difficult one because clearly all engineering structures do deflect. The question is whether you are allowed to make performance benefit from that, and the FIA – Charlie Whiting – has clarified on several occasions that you are not. The difficulty is what sort of test you come up with that is safe to perform in parc ferme conditions because the rear wings do have very significant loads on them that you probably wouldn't want to place on the car in parc ferme in case they fell off and hurt somebody. The designs of the wings that people have used in the past and certainly have either allowed what we call the slot gap – the gap between the first element and the second element of the wing to either close up or to open up and by doing so change the drag and the lift on the car, and you can see that in the past a number of teams have gained extra top speed from that - that's been tightened up a certain amount by regulation changes in the last year or so or more stringent application of certain stiffness tests. I think we probably still need to see a change in the regulation there to see that that geometry has to remain constant all the way across the speed, and one way to do that is to make sure that the physical arrangement of what the rear wing is like is consistent with not being able to change that gap.

What is your opinion about the new qualifying format?

I think it was great fun, something we had studied in a lot of details and rehearsed a lot and made the specific preparations for handling the cars, particularly in the last session, trying to get the cars with their tyres changed simultaneously. Having said that, having practiced everything and rehearsed everything, I think the first session showed that you could revert on the edge of getting it wrong badly, so there is a lot of learning during the first weekend. It will be interesting to see what the qualifying brings up this weekend. I am sure everybody will learn again for a couple of more races and it will settle down. But it is very busy and there is no room for error and that certainly is a challenge, a challenge we will enjoy.

The third car facility has been questioned recently; would you like to see that reviewed?

It's clearly an advantage for us but maybe it's just a way of helping to mix up the grid to try and give a little bit of a penalty to the top four teams and a little bit of a bonus to the following teams to maybe avoid teams just running away. It keeps you having to work hard.

Honest and frank thoughts on a standard ECU, please?

Not really my area to comment that much apart from the fact that in both road car engine design and in race car engine design the engine hardware and the controller is very much thought of as a complete package, so it's a thing where an engine manufacturer, a car manufacturer would always normally want to be developing engine and ECU together so in that sense, it's something we would rather keep and not go to an independent third party. The other issue from the team side is that changing ECUs and changing all the integrated code with it and the software the team uses is a very big challenge and there's not a lot of time between now and the beginning of 2008 and none of us would want to be starting on January 1, 2008 with a new system. We want to be trying to test it earlier so I think there's a pretty tight timescale.

In the lead-up to the season, it seemed it was very close between you, Renault, Ferrari and McLaren. With one Grand Prix weekend out of the way, do you see any patterns in the performance which might differentiate?

Seeing the pattern that the teams which we thought were going to be strong are strong on race pace last weekend, it certainly was very close with ourselves and those three teams. I think it's quite an even field this year. I think there are a lot of teams very close in performance. It will take the new few races, I think, to get a more detailed pattern but for sure, I think we all know which are the strong teams and what you have to do with such a tough grid is you have to be right in every session, in every race and you can't afford any mistakes, whether they are reliability or strategy, you have to get it right and it's the person who is going to be most reliable, most consistent who is going to win this year.

From what you know so far, on which circuit do you think your car and your team has the best chance to win a Grand Prix this year?

You never design a car to be quick on one type of circuit, you want to be quick everywhere and certainly we're looking at this year with strong pre-season testing knowing that there are quite a few teams with very similar performance. We really have to go to every single race and try to do as well as we can at every race, just take them one by one, so we're not developing the car specifically for any one circuit and I don't think any one circuit is more important than another, although clearly there are some races you can think of as home races or not, and there are some circuit which may have historically proven better but no, I think we're trying to go and be quick everywhere.