Japan: Geoff Willis speaks up at the Friday Five

Geoff Willis
By Phil Huff (10/10/2003)
October 10 2003

The FIA's 'Friday Five' press conference took place at the Suzuka circuit today, and Lucky Strike BAR Honda's Technical Director Geoffrey Willis was in attendance. Here's what he had to say...

Q: First of all, a question to all of you. We've seen the race weekend schedule for next year and I think it's fair to say that the press room is not impressed: there's nothing for the small teams, no cost cutting, nothing competitive on Fridays. And yet we've had a fantastic championship this year and there's a certain feeling of 'if it ain't broke, why fix it?' Your comments please, what do you feel about the changes being proposed, and why have they been proposed? Geoff, are there technical, tactical and design concerns in the new regulations?

Geoff Willis: The biggest change next year is clearly the single engine regulation, and there will be a trade-off trying to minimise mileage versus maximising the benefit of having two hours running on the Friday. A couple of things about the regulations still need to be clarified. Certainly they would apply to us. We don't fully understand what the tyre allocation issue is going to be for the third driver on Friday and would we be forced to use the third driver for the rest of the weekend? We are not quite sure what the implications will be for the engine. The two qualifying sessions on Saturday; we are probably going to need a bit more time between them but these are small details. I think, very much like Patrick says, it's different but I'm sure we'll find the correct solution and we'll work around it. I don't think it really offers anything particularly strange from a technical point of view.

Q: Another one for you all. It's been a very close championship this year. Is that because of the regulation changes or has it been because of normal development?

GW: Probably we've seen more varied effect of the tyre battle this year. There hasn't been such a consistent benefit one way or the other and it has depended on circuits and on conditions. And also, yes, there are more teams competing at a close to equal level technically so I think that's mixed it up. I personally don't think the qualifying has made any real difference to the outcome of the championship.

Q: Geoff, Honda pressure here, and expectations?

GW: Well, certainly a number of reasons for pressure here. It's our home Grand Prix in a number of ways, certainly the tie-up between Honda and Suzuka circuit and Honda have a big plant here. In terms of importance, certainly we are pushing very hard to get back to fifth place in the championship. Clearly it's just as important to do well here as it was at any other race this year and if we don't succeed in what we're trying to do, getting that fifth place, it won't just be because of failing here it will be because of failing earlier in the year.

Q: You've had a driver change here as well. What are your thoughts on Jacques' departure and Takuma's sparkling arrival?

GW: Yes, certainly we had little notice of Jacques' decision. I heard yesterday on the train at about eleven o'clock in the morning after a telephone conversation between Craig Pollock and David Richards. Takuma has settled in very well. I think he's done a very good job today. We went through our programme today without error and a good safe but not too conservative qualifying lap this afternoon. Certainly we've all worked with Takuma. He's been testing for us this year and he knows the ropes, he knows the procedures, he knows the engineers, he knows the mechanics and he knows the circuit very well, so in some ways it's been a gentle way in for him, but despite that, it's been big pressure for him and I think he's done a very good job today.

Q: How much has he grown up in the last year, would you say?

GW: It's difficult to make an answer there. He's certainly very easy to get on with, intelligent, perceptive and we've certainly enjoyed working with him and we're looking forward to working with him next year.

Q: Patrick and Geoff, over the years we have heard stories that Jacques Villeneuve could be difficult to work with, that he didn't have the right attitude, that he didn't fit in the team. I don't know if those are true or not. At Indianapolis, Jacques said 'ask the guys I work with, they will tell you I give 100 percent and there is a lot of respect within the immediate team, my engineers, my mechanics and me?' Could you enlighten us one way or the other?

Patrick Head: Well, I have to say Geoff's the right one to reply. It is a long time ago since we worked with Jacques, obviously the end of 1998. I think to us his best year was 1996, when he was very individual, willing to try quite different set-ups that sometimes he provoked and remember he jolly nearly won the world championship in his first year in Formula One. He jolly nearly, but for an oil leak, won his first ever Grand Prix. I think he is a great driver, there is no doubt about that. In 1997, I think he had really a reasonably better car than Michael. In my view he made it unnecessarily hard to win the championship and certainly if I had said to Jacques 'I think you are running a little bit too stiff, I think you should look at softening the car up a bit, Jacques would look over at Jock and say 'I want to go stiffer tomorrow'. It was perverseness, really. He is quite a perverse fellow and his attitude is 'I'll show you I can do it my way'. Whether he had learned to be a bit wiser in his older years I don't know, but I think he made bloody hard work of winning the world championship in 1997. Meanwhile he is a very talented, very fast driver, and why he has had such a difficult time this year I really don't know and I'd rather hand over to Geoff now.

GW: Yes, Jacques is certainly a very robust character. I have very much enjoyed working with him over the last two years and I think in character very similar to how he was back in 1996 and 1997. I think he is a person who's quite a private person and can therefore seem to be quite distant, quite assertive outside but within a small group of people I think he is great, he is very open. In terms of his technical input he is very observant, spends a lot of time thinking about what has happened to the car, particularly during the race. He figuratively thinks on his feet, he is inclined to be his own man, in the way he wants to set the car up and the way he wants to operate. Possibly for that a little excessively difficult, but over the years I think he had actually become a better driver, certainly he was a lot better in the wet and a lot better in adversity. This year, it is difficult to say why he struggled so much. Certainly the team didn't help him in some areas with our reliability and earlier on in the year we let him down a number of times but he certainly has always tried very hard, he has always given a huge amount of commitment to his racing. I think probably he was an even more rounded driver just recently than he was in the days that he was winning the championship.

Q: Does Formula One as an industry, in terms of television revenue and everything else, make money from Fridays?

GW: It didn't take very long this year to realise there wasn't a big penalty if you didn't qualify well on Friday as long as you weren't in the first five out on Saturday and I am fairly sure that during the year various people ran certain amounts of fuel to make it slightly harder for their competitors to see exactly where they were and it was always the case that Friday afternoon qualifying was never the same as qualifying was last year, when people went as fast as the car will go. And I think that always left a certain amount of doubt, certainly from the technical point of view. You had good confidence in what your fuel level was but you didn't assume that everyone else was empty either... But for Saturday it is a different thing. But then again, by the end of the race, we can on Sunday.. we can work out what everybody qualified on anyway.

Q: Williams had a problem with the fuel rigs at Indianapolis and I think that pretty much all of you have had a problem with the rig at one stage or another. The problem for us is that when we go to talk to the teams they say it is because of a faulty FIA rig and when we go to talk to Charlie Whiting he says in every case it is down to operator error. Are you satisfied with the fuel rigs and if not what should be improved?

GW: I think our only rig problem this year was in fact self-induced. I think over the years we have not been completely happy with the regs. We have eventually evolved to a point that we are happy. Whether all the time and expense and effort of doing that engineering has actually been worth it I am not sure.

Q: F1's like being a trained athlete. You spent years training up to run the fastest possible and now you are being told you can only use one leg.

GW: It is a very good question because you can say an awful lot about this. Engineering is all about resource management. If you remember the old definition of an engineer: An engineer is the person who can do for a pound what any fool can do for ten and we have always had resource limitations, whether it is money, time, material properties, whatever. So it doesn't really matter what the regulations are, there is still an engineering challenge, you are competing against others in an arbitrary set of regulations. But they may be no more arbitrary than the budget you have got as an architect or something like that. So I don't really mind what regulations we have. Clearly from a safety point of view it is easier to control the cars than it is to re-design circuits. We have got to get the balance between technological interest and competition and television spectacle. The only problem we have is trying to come up with a set of technical regulations that avoids typecasting the cars and it is quite difficult at the moment the way we have evolved the regulations by more and more small restrictive steps that is suspect if you painted all the cars exactly the same colour and you all asked yourselves honestly, could you actually recognise which car was which? And that is our biggest challenge in the technical working group. We keep skating around it. How do we come up with a clever set of regulations that don't force the solution to be almost identical, keeps the competitiveness, keeps the finance under control and maintains the safety. It's something I don't think we have solved yet but we continue to talk about it.

Q: After so much serious discussion, can each of you forecast the results for the championship? It is not a debate, it is just a nice game that looks good in the papers!

GW: It is a difficult one. If you are talking about who you would like to win the championship I must say I think I would have liked to see Juan Pablo win it. He is a very open character with a competitive nature...

Q: But who do you think will win it?

GW: I think it will be Michael winning the drivers', um, and I would like to think my old team has a good chance of winning the constructors'.