Bahrain: Otmar Szafnauer at the Friday Five

By Phil Huff
April 1 2005

Representatives from the engine manufacturers sat down for the Friday Five press conference today, including Honda Racing Development's Otmar Szafnauer, who is also now a BAR board member.

Due to some pressing time pressures, there wasn't a lot said. Here's as much as Otmar managed to get in...

The FIA has introduced measures to save costs this year such as two-race engines and fewer sets of tyres per driver per weekend. Have you saved money?

The regulation change was made quite late and therefore we had to embark on some re-designs which have proven to be costly, so this year we won't be saving any money.

What have you discovered when you've opened up those engines, has it been a nasty surprise or has it been pretty much as you expected?

Yes, unfortunately we had the engine problems at the last Grand Prix and at the first Grand Prix we strategically didn't finish the race. But no, nothing that wasn't expected after we'd done the mileage that is required for two Grands Prix with the engine. We think we've overcome our problems of the last Grand Prix and hopefully two races from now we will look inside and not find any surprises.

We had almost double the humidity at the last race to what we have here. How much does the humidity change things, Otmar?

From a cooling perspective it is a bit easier here than it was in Malaysia. Because the conditions in Sepang were so harsh we are hoping engine longevity here will be a bit better. For us, we had our problems, we had two weeks to come up with a robust solution and I think we have done that and we aim to finish the race well in the points.