By Phil Huff
March 19 2005

Geoff Willis was called to the traditional Friday Five press conference yesterday, and spoke of Jacques Villeneuve, Anthony Davidson, Red Bull and turning the clock back 30 years. First of all, what have you learned from today and in Australia about the new rules?

In terms of performance, it is too early to say what we have learned about who is stronger and weaker. In terms of the operation of a car over the weekend, I think we showed last year that we are all pretty good at responding to the changes and learning to work with only two tyres today and try to make some sort of scientific evaluation – and I am sure Pat is actually making a scientific evaluation and not a non-scientific evaluation – but the tricky thing for us is how little we are running and maybe that is something that as we get more confident through the season, we will get more running because it is fairly quiet first session. I think very much like last year, we will get better at it. We will understand it and we will find it was not so much of a change as we thought.

What have you done here to cope with the extreme conditions and is it the ultimate test for the rest of the year?

On cooling systems, I don’t think it’s a particularly big challenge here. Yes it’s extreme temperatures, but now we are all experienced and we can predict from one circuit to another and from one year to another. So it is relatively straightforward to get the cooling of the engine and the electronics, which in these conditions can get very close. In fact, we made some small changes at the last test for this race. The real issue is going to be tyre-wear in this race and it is something we will need to think about carefully and it may have an effect on the outcome, but I suspect both tyre companies are being conservative so (I am) not expecting any big surprises. There may be a mix-up towards the end.

Toyota put out a statement about the interpretation of the rules regarding engine changes during the week. What is your interpretation of them? What was your motivation?

Formula One is a competition and it was a very clear option available to us and understood by all and I am surprised that nobody else chose to do it. I know for a fact that some did think of doing it, but didn’t do so. So, it was the regulation at the time and its now been closed off by clarification so it wont be available in the future.

You’re not allowed to use a third driver this year. How does it complicate your job and can you see the impact of that in the results?

It’s a little too early to say what the impact is in terms of results. We’ve certainly lost an advantage we had last year. The use of a third driver, a very experienced driver in the team, Anthony Davidson, would have been very useful this year for helping with tyre choice, being able to have more tyres and being able to not worry about engine mileage on Friday so certainly it’s an advantage to have it, but as we knew that as we got a good result in the championship last year that it wasn’t going to be available to us this year. We’re just going to have to, like the other top teams, find a way round it.

You’ve had recent experience working with Jacques Villeneuve. I wonder if you could talk about your experience of him as a driver and whether you’ve been surprised by his recent pace in a Sauber?

It’s a difficult question to answer. I get the impression that Jacques is not particularly happy in his current position. I’m sure he wasn’t happy with Melbourne’s race. Obviously being outside the team, I’m not aware of what the issues are. As Pat says, he’s a hard-working driver, who’s got a lot of experience in the car. The cars have changed quite a lot since he was driving for us two years ago. I think he’s very sensitive to what the car does, what the engine does and he gives a lot of feedback, so I’m sure he will be having quite a lot of detailed conversations with his engineers at the moment. He’s an extraordinarily competitive character and I’m sure he will be trying to get it back.

The president of the international federation has been dropping hints or perhaps a little more strongly suggesting that a new Formula One in the future would benefit from, he suggests, a 90 per cent reduction in down-force and the possibility of a return to big rear tyres. I’m interested to know from you technical guys whether it really is possible to recreate the cars of 30 years ago or would you guys find the missing 90 percent of downforce in 10 minutes?

There are a number of points here. The first is supporting what’s been said: it’s very easy to jump in and say ‘we’re going to make a rule change, this is going to help overtaking.’ As we’ve seen already this year – something we didn’t anticipate – it looks as though it’s much harder to follow cars closely with the new aerodynamic regulations and possibly harder as well to overtake, and that’s (following) a relatively small loss in down-force which has certainly not helped. So therefore, if we’re going to set ourselves this target, we need to study it pretty carefully and probably need to get some fairly realistic aerodynamic studies done and studies of what’s going to happen if we change the balance between aerodynamic and mechanical grip. I think, overall, what we’ve got to make sure of is not just that we have close racing, overtaking, but we have to keep Formula One as a technical pinnacle. It has to be the fastest motor sport out there and one of the worries that I have is that if we have reduce the down-force to ten percent, if that’s our objective, it’s going to be quite difficult to keep it at the level of being the fastest, the most impressive, the most visually stunning form of motor sport. I think we do need to see racing where cars are closer to each other, not necessarily lots of overtaking, but probably close proximity. If we cast our minds back over the last 15 or 20 years, a lot of what we remember as good races, didn’t have many overtaking manoeuvres, but they had many almost overtaking manoeuvres. I think as long as we find, technically, some solution, which comes up with that, then the numbers will come out of that rather just setting ourselves a target. So I would be a little bit wary. And the other point is that Mike said ‘going back to cars of 30 years ago’. It’s not going to happen really because the cars now are so much better engineered, they are phenomenally reliable, they can be driven right to 99 percent of their performance throughout the race. These are all things that have changed and are unlikely to go back and they have changed the nature of racing.

What is now the use of Fridays and in which way should it be changed in the future?

For those teams that don’t have a third car, with the new engine regulations, is a day we do very little running. We do the minimum we can to get a good read on the two tyre choices, and what it shows is that we don’t really need Friday in order to get a set-up for the race weekend, and it has become an anachronism and it’s probably time that we changed the format of the race weekend to do something positive with Fridays to give much more value for the people that watch either at the circuit or on the TV.

Now that the season has started, and nine of the teams have self-imposed testing limits, how much of an advantage is it to Ferrari to be able to basically test as much as they want?

I think certainly for BAR-Honda it’s a disadvantage to have agreed to limit our testing, that’s quite clear, but we made that agreement because we think it’s a positive thing to get some control of the amount of testing we do, and there is a significant cost associated with testing in terms of shipping the cars, the wear and tear, the use of components that are ‘lifed’. It is a significant part of the expenditure of a team. However, we still feel that we needed to have as much testing – more testing – than we’ve agreed to, but, despite that, we think it’s in the long-term interest that we do end up with a certain amount of control and that’s why we happily signed up to this agreement. I think it’s a good sign that at least nine teams, at the moment, have agreed to it. All the individual teams have to do quite a lot of running for the reliability, particularly for engines with the new regulations. It will be, with the change of regulations, a season where we see quite a lot of developments so, for sure, it will be more difficult, towards the end of the year and we’ll have to be very disciplined in controlling it, but that’s what we’ve all agreed to do, and I’m very confident that we will all continue to agree.

There’s a new team in Formula One, it’s an Austrian team, Red Bull. I would like your own personal view of the team, what you like, what you dislike, the pluses and the minuses, and how far this new outfit can go?

You certainly get the impression it’s a re-vitalised team. It’s a difficult transition at the end of the Jaguar era, and I think it’s good to have more financial commitment into Formula One, good to have another team which is full of confidence and we’ll looking forward to seeing what happens in this first year.

What are the chances of BAR releasing Davidson, if he’s required by another team?

Yes, this story... Very much the same as have been the discussions we had last year with the possibility of Anthony driving for one or two teams. It is that Anthony is a BAR driver at the moment. We don’t have our driver decisions made for 2006 and therefore if we had any discussion with Anthony driving for another team this year, it would only be on the grounds that it would be for a single year and I think that that’s our position. But I would say that we have had no contact whatsoever, so you are probably better informed than we are.

Given the huge amount of work on Sundays, did you find difficulties in organisation in Melbourne?

I think that we’ve all learned, over the last few years, as the format of the race weekend has changed, that we can be flexible and we can quickly learn how to operate to a new timetable.