How important is environmentally relevant technology to the future of motorsport?

In our view it is absolutely critical. Formula One should run side-by-side with road car developments. The technologies which we are developing in Formula One should have some linkage to the basic business and in the case of Honda clearly the hybrid technology which is very similar to the KERS system that we are putting on Formula One cars next year is very dear to our hearts. It is featured on the current Honda Civic. We have got a new low cost hybrid being brought out in very large volumes next year and having Formula One and the road car side use relevant technologies is critical. What we hope for the future is that there will be further evolution of environmentally friendly technologies on the Formula One car. It really does work in synchronisation with what we are doing on the other side of the business, so we are very, very supportive. We are very pleased with our green tyres as they match the rest of our car very nicely. So thank you, Bridgestone.

You have been invited to a meeting with the President of the FIA. What specific areas are there where you can see that savings can be made in Formula One?

I think the first thing to say from our side and I think with all the other teams we do feel there is a need to reduce costs. The important thing from our point of view is to reduce costs which frankly are wasted expenditure and I think there are several of those areas. Whether they are enough to meet the targets that we need is another matter. In terms of specifics I think the one that is frequently cited is the area around the brakes and the brake ducts, the so-called keg tins, which surround the discs and duct the air. It is an area where probably the number of physical moulds that are required to make those parts have doubled or even tripled over the past couple of years because the parts are so intricate. We now all have very similar systems and it is very expensive. A lot of the aerodynamic testing goes into that area. It is probably not an area of performance differentiation and that is probably an area where we could do something which reduces costs. I think there is general agreement that the gearbox is an area where we have all now migrated to so-called quick shift gearboxes. I suspect we have all got slightly different mechanisms inside but again it is not a performance differentiator. Another idea that is being worked on is the centre of gravity of the car. Weight reduction or specifying a weight target is one thing but when we spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to move weight from slightly higher up to slightly lower down and then add tungsten on the bottom of the car, again is somewhat wasteful and again the general opinion among the technical directors and from Ross (Brawn) who is running that group is that a lot can be done in that area. The power train, the engine, is an area where I know there is more controversy. I think we all do feel that we could migrate to a lower cost power train. The V8 19,000rpm engine we have at the moment is hugely expensive, up to about €300,000 per unit. They are immensely expensive and going to a different type of engine, maybe a four cylinder engine, would be cheaper with all the environmental technologies hung onto that. I think certainly from the Honda side and I suspect from some of the other manufacturers’ sides we would like to preserve the ability to design and make that engine as it is part of our brand identity but making the specification a lot more prescriptive, making it a lot cheaper, is something I think that many of us would support.

I understand that you have got a new pit signalling system here. How does it work and how are you going to make it work where perhaps for others it hasn’t?

It is something we have been working on actually for quite a long time and we are not proposing to use it at the moment in races, probably until next year. But we are going to use the Fridays and maybe Saturdays over the next few races to practice. I think the answer to your question and I am not going to go into the technical detail because I am not equipped to do so, but I understand that the philosophy of design is maybe fundamentally different to some of the others. The first emphasis is on safety and the second emphasis is obviously on performance and I understand our system is designed in such a way that if the fuel hose is not disconnected the car physically won’t be able to move. That is the primary feature. The secondary feature are features which hopefully will improve the speed of the pit stop but from what we understand of other people’ systems it might be designed from a slightly different point of view. We don’t have a safety concern given the philosophy but we do want to use it extensively before we use it in anger.

You are involved in Formula One to sell cars. At the moment there’s a bit of a financial crisis around the world; what do you think the real impact of that will be on Formula One and as a secondary question, how do you feel about not being in North America at all, the world’s biggest car market?

On Canada, we are hugely disappointed – it’s difficult to emphasise by how much. Honda is very successful in Canada, we make cars there, the local company there is hugely enthusiastic about Formula One. We have large numbers of guests from America and from Canada. We sponsor the event, we would like to see it back on the calendar as soon as possible and I support John’s comments that I think it will be a major topic of conversation among the teams at the next meeting of the teams. I think we need to look at North America on a more strategic basis. As soon as we were down to one race on the continent, things inevitably were going to get difficult because the costs of transportation and appearing just once across the other side of the Atlantic were huge and I think really we need to look at how we’re not just going to get back Canada but how we get back to America, potentially more than once, as it is such an important market.

On the other subject, we do need to work together as ten teams to make sure that the ten teams stick together, work together and survive. We’ve got a fantastically successful series, we’ve just come off the back of arguably one of the best weekends and we need to preserve that. Like Mario, I’m incredibly encouraged by the first round of meetings of FOTA but the first meetings are inevitably usually the easiest ones. It’s when you get down to the nitty gritty it gets somewhat more difficult. There’s a lot of diversity in the income and the levels of sponsorship, the parent company ownership of the teams. At one of the scale is probably a company like Honda or Toyota or BMW which are extremely successful in share price. Certainly Honda has done rather better or lost rather less than most of the others but we shouldn’t be complacent and what we’ve got to do is to make sure that other teams which maybe aren’t making money and do have sponsors that are hugely affected by the latest financial crisis do come through it and I think FOTA and the meetings with the FIA and with Bernie [Ecclestone) are the mechanism to try and make sure that happens. We really do have to pull together, we’ve got off to a good start but the difficult bit is yet to come.

The situation is very difficult to predict; how quickly do you have to react to this economic situation? You have been talking about cost-cutting and now it looks as if you’ve made a practical step but is the regulation about the long-term future quickly enough? Will you have to make a change a bit earlier than you expected?

I see this in the same way as you would address the problem in any other business. It needs a range of actions, some are short term, some are medium term and some are long term. You divide those up: some things are impossible in the short run. It’s not possible to design a new engine in six months, that’s in the medium or long term, that’s two years. People do have employment contracts and we have to respect that, that’s another medium term one but I do feel that whilst we shouldn’t panic, we need to do things for the short term and that means next year. It’s difficult to say otherwise when you have five thousand people laid off recently at a car factory in France. How can that manufacturer turn to its employees and say it’s not going to do anything. There’s a requirement for some of the Formula One teams to have instant action. You’ve only got to look at the accounts of some of the Formula One teams to see losses over the last couple of years and that needs to be addressed. The bank manager is not going to lend any more money. I agree completely with what’s been said: we shouldn’t panic, we shouldn’t do anything which is going to harm something which is very successful but on the other hand that doesn’t mean do nothing. It means you’ve got to do a bit of everything and you’ve got to start now, and I think that’s the message, rightly so, and we’ve got to come up with the appropriate response.

Could Bernie Ecclestone's spec engine idea eventually come down to how much of an engine you have to build to be able to say it’s a Honda as opposed to just a standard engine? Isn’t that essentially what it’s going to come down to? Because he wants you to have a standard engine with a bit of face-saving stuff, so you can say it’s a Honda.

Without being semantic about it, I think we do have to define our terms. I think most of us are not happy at all with the idea of a standard engine which we would define as an engine, maybe even designed and made by someone else, similar to the old Cosworth DFV and that’s not something that Honda, and it sounds like, Toyota and BMW would particularly support. In our case we are the largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines in the world, it’s the core of the company. But on the other hand, a specification engine or a prescriptive engine, where the design was very, very tight, the materials were very tightly controlled, it was maybe a four cylinder engine which was much cheaper but we had the ability to put our brand identity on it in that we were designing it, we were making the thing, then that’s a very different proposition and I think you would be able to reduce the costs very significantly by doing that. So I think the end result may not be massively different but the thinking behind it is very, very different.

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