By pitpass.com (13/05/2003)
May 13 2003

As Lucky Strike BAR Honda looks ahead to this weekend's Austrian GP, the key word on everyone's lips is reliability, something Jacques Villeneuve is keen to see improve. Jacques Villeneuve has the worst reliability of the drivers, the former world Champion having only completed 143 out of a possible 295 laps (48.47%), while as a team BAR has completed 412 laps out of a possible 590 (69.83%).

"When your target is a two-car points finish it's obviously disappointing for us to come away from Barcelona with nothing," says David Richards. "Jacques' retirement is something we are taking very seriously as we cannot afford to have non-finishes so we are working flat out to get on top of reliability issues.

"Both our drivers were on target for points-finishes when Jacques was stopped by an ignition problem and Jenson was involved in the incident with Coulthard," adds technical director Geoff Willis. "Following further analysis by Honda in Japan we now have a better understanding of the sequence of events that stopped Jacques during the race and we have put countermeasures in place. In Austria we need to finally get on top of these race reliability issues in order to finish both cars."

This article was written by pitpass.com and is used with permission.