Jaguar – front of the Formula One midfield pack

By Steve
March 17 2003

Managing Director David Pitchforth sheds light on the strategy that contributed to jaguars poor qualifying but solid race that saw Mark as high as 4th before retiring from 5th position.

"The tyre war is going to be very interesting now and I think we're in good shape. We had five different compounds in Australia and we opted for a harder compound, which worked very well," he told the team's website. "It's difficult to say where we are relative to the competition but I'd like to think that we're near the front of the midfield pack."
Pitchforth is also confident that the team can rectify the problems that befell Webber at the Melbourne event. "We understand the root cause of the problems and it wasn't suspension failure as such that caused the retirements," he said. "I don't think we'll have that problem again."
Mark and Antonio had relatively a poor qualifying session but perhaps their tyres were not up to temperature at the beginning of the qualifying lap.Pitchforth had this to say "We could have done better in qualifying but Mark and Antonio both made small errors. We also resisted the temptation to do anything in qualifying that would affect our race strategy, such as running with low fuel and sticky tyres."