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The big budget arena of Formula One provides a high profile backdrop to a cutting edge
of technology and innovation which moves further and faster than virtually anything else in
the world. Even the aerospace industry, the crucible of scientific advance for the past
25 years can't respond at the week by week pace demanded by Formula One. Inevitably,
those demands are met in different ways by teams at different ends of the literal and
financial pit lane. At one end of the scale are the cash rich teams with only marginally
more money than trophies and titles, who plough vast fortunes into research and development
and who always do well even in adversity. At the other end are the poorer, often newer
teams whose entire budget for the season wouldn't pay the catering bill at McLaren.
Certainly a small budget by Formula One standards but I think there are pure three teams in
our position who really have to watch the pennies and also have to cut back on certain
areas that you would normally want to spend money on to do it properly. But it's just
a fact of life in Formula One that for new teams and for teams which are trying to establish
themselves you just have to run at a budget level which you can realistically achieve
rather than what you'd ideally love to have because the sponsorship isn't thick on the
ground whenever you're towards the back of the grid, certainly in the bottom half of
the grid and certainly while you're still establishing yourself. New 1995 regulations
have given all the teams a clean sheet start to the season but in many ways that serves
only to heighten the difference between the haves and the have nots. We would have still
done it, we would have still come in but they're made in more areas where we were behind. The
status quo remains the same usually whatever. Last year it wouldn't have made really any
difference to us anyway and this year we had to build a completely new structure and a
completely new car so whichever way the other rules went from safety terms wouldn't really
have made any difference to us although it did allow everybody to start from scratch
but obviously the certain teams have information and data which always, no matter what you
do, is valuable. But the technology has given us perhaps an advantage on small things, fly
by wire, traction control but then I mean if you look at Formula One now there's no
doubt that there are other things taking the place and we know those are available and
we don't have them at the moment because of budget but we need to achieve them so it goes
in the mix of F1 and you never stop it. It's like the performance, the performance now
will come up to where it was, it's an ongoing process. For the middle ranked teams the problems
remain the same. Again it's about the interpretation, I mean to be honest there's room to do a lot
and if you're a big team that has got major international backing and you're willing to
take a shot at something and fight for what you believe is interpretation then it's very
open and you can do a lot but when you're a small team and you can't afford to upset
some people then you have to back off a bit. You are shackled really because you read the
regulations of the different, you read the writing that's there but basically you have
to try and interpret into what somebody else at the FIA might think and it's never really
good when it's that way. I think to be honest the regulations would be better to be written
you know and be ten times the amount they are but then it defines them and then it gives
you room to actually manoeuvre. There will always be that flash of brilliance hopefully
that will bring the car up but for the beginning of this year I think everybody had to take
a fairly sort of steady look at it because there was such a big change so they had to
put themselves at the baseline to work from to see how the car reacted to the new regulations
and then I think you'll see the steps come in you know later this year, early next year
I think you'll see big changes in the car. There's an old motor racing expression which
says there's nothing wrong with this that can't be fixed with a bucket full of money
but it's a bucket full of money usually best spent away from the race track. If you look
up the pit lane really and look at what you might suspect the budgets will be for the
various teams. The teams with the biggest budgets are as a general rule the ones in
front. That's what money and manpower do for you. You know at the end of the day they give
themselves a baseline to work on they knew they were going to change it dramatically
weird the same but we we can't run quite as fast with them because we don't have the
manpower and the money. Formula One is represented as the summit of achievement
the ultimate progression through the ranks but though that may be true of drivers like
Toulthard Hill, Alessian Schumacher who have all come up the hard way it's completely different
for teams and team owners. The fact is that most young drivers see Formula One as a goal
it's the aiming point on which their ambition is focused but for team owners that single-minded
attack on a perceived pinnacle isn't always so clear cut.
Not every one of them dreamed of this moment owning their own team.
No it was never a goal I mean my goal was to be a driver and like everybody you adapt
and you haven't got any money and I sort of then went what else could I do which is the
next best thing and I didn't like working for anybody particularly so I started living it
as you like through the team and it progressed in achievements. When I started the goal would
have been Formula Three but again I couldn't raise the funding and so we started off in Formula
Four which I wasn't very excited about at the time but you adapt and when you're doing it
and you're committed to doing it it suddenly becomes the most important thing and I think
it's important that every formula has its own technique people should never underestimate
formulas because there's a lot to be learned in other formulas. Pacific are at the Noah's
Ark end of the pit lane where everything comes in twos. Big teams have five of everything engines
race cars gearboxes you name it but Pacific have got two cars two engines two gearboxes and two Bob.
It's no secret that last year in our first year in Formula One we didn't qualify of course for
11 of the 16 races but we were operating on a budget of around about five million dollars
and that's a figure which the vast majority of teams don't believe that it was possible to run
on when you're buying your engines and all the rest of it but Keith Wiggins was able to negotiate
very competitive contracts he was able to make sure that we had
the resource to do what we had to do last year which was to get a foot in the door of Formula
One and to compete and we turned up for all the races with two cars we took part in practice and
qualifying we learned a lot we tried our level best to turn the car into a competitive car
and we did compete in five Grand Prix so we got to the end of the year and I think for the budget
we had we were we weren't happy with what we got there but at least we felt that we had given it
our best shot with what we had at our disposal now for this year we have had to at least double that
budget I mean I think this year we will probably spend 10 to 12 million dollars we'd like to
achieve 15 million dollars in sponsorship but I think we'll probably operate on 10 to 12
off which you know something like half will go to pay for our engine supply and the engine supply
of course is critical last year we used a relatively old version of a no more v10 engine
we had reliability problems this year with the Cosworth ed we've had four races so far the engines
have performed faultlessly we get excellent technical support from them and suddenly that variable
has been eliminated shall we say from the list of problems that we had from last year so you know
you get what you pay for
so
but even at the budget end of the pit lane the level of technology required to stay on the back
of the grid is frightening forget if you can about the needs of design and engineering
just monitoring the car's activities during practice qualifying and during the race requires
the presence of more computing power than was necessary to put Neil Armstrong on the moon just
25 years ago and pacific have to muster every penny they can and all the help they can get
the memory on the car is two megabytes so i have to arrange the things i keep track of to suit the
memory i have all right so what i do during the race is that i will keep track of about 20 or 30
parameters which are basically engine and gearbox parameters so that i can know after the race if
the race finishes no problems you know we don't need to look at it but if there is a problem then
i need the data to know what happened okay now if during practice and qualifying that data i can
get through the telemetry for the most part so what i will do that is i'll keep track of more
the suspension data which is what we use to actually set the car up so in that case i'll
actually be keeping track of more up to 40 or 50 different parameters all right and these are mostly
engine parameters so basically all you want to know is whether the engine is still healthy if
you've got a problem like that there's a few other items on here there's a gearbox pressure
and this one here is a gear number so you know whether the driver what gear is in
you also have throttle position which you wouldn't think you don't need to know that but you do
in fact what happens if the driver has a problem you can tell you know what sort of problem it was
whether if you fell off or whether he was going flat out when the engine blew up type thing or
you know which hasn't happened hopefully never will but if you say it you know you know you can
relate the items together so you know what's happening when the car is driving around there's
a radio link which sends me back continual information and when the car stops i then connect
to the car with a cable and that information is then what i used to analyze you know what has
actually happened and that happens within 30 seconds all right i can take all that information
and i can put it on the graph so that i can see exactly where i am at any one particular point
if i move the cursor the cursor here will move as well so i can relate to all the all the data
i get a number read out at the bottom that tells me we were doing 205 kilometers at that particular
point these other two traces are actually the front suspension this this is actually a 66
megahertz machine but we're actually finding it's not fast enough and so our sponsors hewlett park
are actually supplying for faster machines so we're actually having the best that you can get
mclaren also like to have the best but they can afford it and build 95 percent of the cars
themselves in house while pacific do little more than assemble them i mean we subcontract most of
the manufacture of the car and that works well for us because it means that you know if times
are lean we don't have big overheads here and when you know if we're flush we can go to some
contractors and get more things made we can control things a little bit more that way so it suits us
in our current position jordan groan pray who i was very lucky to work with for a short time
and they've moved into formula one i worked with them throughout their first season i think in
many ways paved the way for the smaller teams of the 1990s who came in here were very ambitious who
have had their eyes set on challenging the the big uh what we would consider the big bulky
very expensive teams of the 1980s we think that that's something which is going to have to change
and jordan of course in four years have come through from being a team exactly the same size
of ours with you know the personnel in the in the low to mid 30s subcontracting everything
in terms of the manufacture of the car and jordan now actually isn't that much of a larger team
even though they're a factory pojo team now and they still subcontract a lot of their manufacturing
so i think that it is one way to do it
it
there's an element of envy as the smaller teams look along the pit lane to the large ones with
big budgets and posh factories but you won't find it at pacific except perhaps in the ardent
enthusiasm which they press their case upon potential sponsors and they definitely believe
they've got a lot to offer although perhaps not in terms of hours and hours of television exposure
yeah we can do so much with the little budget that we have but we know only too well what
what more we could do if the extra budget was provided so we do tend to show existing sponsors
and potential sponsors what we would actually spend our money on if they provided to us and
at the same time we try and work hard to show sponsors what we will do for them the bigger
teams perhaps won't do because obviously we uh being keener um to to show what we can do we'll
we'll work harder for them the big teams get the tv coverage they get the media coverage
their sponsors that you know chiefly the tobacco companies will be very happy with with achieving
that we obviously can't say to our sponsors that on a sunday afternoon you'll be seen on tvs around
the world for two hours because they won't be but so what we say is a sunday afternoon the icing on
the cake if we get coverage if the cars you know are are competitive in the race that's that's the
bonus points what is important is how we actually work with them monday to friday and that means an
awful lot of work for us away from the grand prix and a lot of planning a strategy for them which
means that you know at the end of the year they can look back and say yeah you know we actually
achieved certain commercial goals with the team and on top of that you know they raced well on
the sunday afternoon as well so it's uh it's really it's a it's a 12 it's a bit of a cliche
but it is a 12 month program for all the sponsors that we work with it's not something that happens
on 16 sundays during the season a larger budget is the dream of everyone in formula one including
those who already count their spending power in tens of millions on their present budget pacific
couldn't afford to buy a full year's supply of new training shoes for mclaren but that kind of
pit lane perfection is beyond their ambitions even with a major sponsor we feel that we know how we
would spend the extra money if we got it to to push it pull ourselves up money is a very important
thing in formula one if you have money you can do certain things with it which should improve
your position having said that the people in your team who are spending the money have to know how
to spend it wisely it's very difficult to waste money and for very easy sorry to waste money in
formula one and it's very difficult to find the right people who know how to spend it wisely
spending money wisely is not the object of the exercise formula ones like war if you have to
worry about how much it's all costing you've lost and for a team like pacific who've climbed the
success ladder from formula four upwards going through every intermediate series winning
championship after championship the harsh realities are sometimes hard to accept having been used to
have been respected and successful at what we've done then i would say last year was a bit of a
culture shock i think not qualifying is something i never even contemplated but
if people say you underestimated formula one and we didn't underestimate it we just
logic said we couldn't do that so we did it with whatever means we had which was greatly under
what was required and we knew that but we weren't going to get anywhere by just talking about it
just talking about it um so i think we had to i had to adapt but it doesn't really
haven't really bothered me i mean we're just on a mission and that's the way it is you know
pacific are indeed on a mission and part of that mission is to collect the necessary funds to do
the job properly instead of just getting by an extra 10 million dollars would make the world
of difference and they know exactly what they'd spend it on we like to have four cars instead of
two because with four cars you can have a car which is totally dedicated to a testing program
you've got a t car so that say if what happened to us at the spanish grand prix this year where
andrea montanarini had a gearbox problem just before the race and wasn't able to start if we
had a t car you know we could have jumped in that um so you'd have four cars instead of two you'd
also have a bigger supply of spares we are to some extent marginally in spares in some areas
um that's not to say if we had an accident we couldn't rebuild a car of course we could but
um we you know you cut back on certain areas so you'd have for example two fully built rear
ends of cars gearboxes rear suspension and that with you'd go on pre so that if you have a gearbox
or a problem or an accident which involves rear end damage you know you can bolt the whole rear
end back onto the car and have that as a spare component um you would develop um a much bigger
research and development program you can spend a lot of time in wind tunnels and for the bigger
teams that obviously is a big advantage they can spend literally weeks and weeks and weeks in the
wind tunnel every time of the year um we have to really pick and choose when we do go into myres
wind tunnel we use the motor industry research association wind tunnel up at non-eating so we
have to pick and choose when we go in there when we go in it's kind of very important we use each
day absolutely to the full because we don't have the resource to keep coming back ad infinitum
you would do a lot more testing we so far after four grand prix's we have only done one day
shakedown testing at snifferton um we haven't been to estero for a week we haven't been to
silverstone running around um you know week week in week out you would develop a testing program
and that means fuel and tires and uh spare parts and the expenses of going and renting the circuits
and that so if if we were given that extra uh investment from sponsorship the whole picture
of pacific would change because we'd suddenly be able to afford the things which the bigger teams
take to some extent for grant is and we'd be able to develop ourselves in a into a much more
uh aggressive formula 110 the fact is you can spend any amount of money in formula one and the
more your sponsors give you the more you spend and you have to running a race-winning team costs
more than most of us can dream about a lot of money
money that we don't have enough we always try to find it a lot of money
difficult to to put it there how much cost an operation like that is how much you got in the
budget i can guarantee you that whatever you can find is what you're going to spend and sometimes
you spend even more than what you find but it's difficult to actually put a figure because if i got
10 more millions of what we have at the moment for sure we're going to spend so start away you're
already increasing your your cost is you never stop we we keep uh learning things we keep developing
things and uh in reality the limitation today is budget the more money you get the more you can
invest in research and more people to get the best people so it's difficult to put a figure just back
with the team from testing new suspension parts in france between grand prix's ken tirrell knows
only too well that extra money for development is exactly what does keep the big teams one step
ahead of those who occupy the middle rank of the formula one grid i think that's also true but i
think that uh that the higher the technology the the further ahead the further the higher the
technology that's going to be permitted the further ahead the teams with the big budget will be
it tirrell have been in business for 25 years collecting three world crowns along the way
but race wins have been thin on the ground in the 90s though the team has an unmistakable
air of confidence about it now
i think people like to work for us um perhaps partly because of our setting here right in the
middle of the green belt where we're not on a trading estate and and partly the way we like
to keep we like to keep the team effort going and it's in grand prix racing is so much dependent
on a good team at it tirrell is also a busy place getting two cars to the start of 16 grand prix a
year is a full-time occupation for a factory employing more than 100 people and imposes a
workload that needs to be carefully monitored everything is on computer there's records of
every component that we make most of the things on the cars are life they have a lot a system where
things are taken off the car after they've done so many kilometers and a 50 back on again new parts
so the whole process is logged every component has a part number on it and that's all on computers
uh that is really down to the production manager to coordinate all this with the sub assembly etc
like formula one so-called big four tirrell make 90 to 95 percent of the car themselves in house
we get machine parts in uh that belong to each individual job but then we make um
up virtually everything else that goes on the job by hand you see those tubes over there behind you
that we basically form ourselves and then trim and cut in all panels on the car are
handmade all panels that belong to jobs in here the uprights the wheel uprights
are all handmade and then welded on by ourselves the list of components made in house includes all
the millions of items which go to make up a race car and they must be made to minute
tolerances so that there's no difference between two similar items that were made on different days
by different people
no because they're all still made to a jig it doesn't matter who makes them they are made to a
jig so that they all should all be identical anyway an engine deal with yamaha is one of the
reasons behind the tirrell resurgence factory engines are worth millions to a race team
and the sponsorship which came on board with micka salo this year has given tirrell the extra
money needed to run a test program of its own the cauldron of formula one doesn't allow for
experimental systems in races so development work must be done at test sessions by those who can
afford it
so
those will always be the biggest and the best funded teams and now you're looking at the most
significant advantage that a big budget can buy track time generally speaking the framework of
a system of rules means that the propensity of one car to be better than any other is a function of
its design and no amount of money can buy you good ideas on a dependable basis you can employ
people with a track record of innovation like john barnard harvey posselthwaite or gary anderson
for example but no matter what you pay them nor what facilities you provide them with you simply
can't make them have race-winning ideas or build championship-winning cars from the outside
mcclaren's mp4 10 would seem to be such a car
so
what you can do and what mclaren did is to take the baseline product and try to refine it into a
winner but that's a process involving enormous manpower and money it requires a full-time test
team with its own cars drivers mechanics technicians and budget then you can go away to race tracks that
have good weather and test new ideas different settings new components and even rehearse
necessary race elements like the complicated choreography of the pit stop complete with tire
change and refueling
oh
Pretty in slow motion, it's breathtaking at real speed.
This is another team which began the 1995 season with expectations high and at first
their hopes seemed well founded.
But within the space of just a few Grands Prix it was clear there was a reliability
problem and that Benetton had managed to effect dramatic improvements in the performance of
its own car.
For any team not in the Premier League like Williams that could easily have been the end
of 1995 but Williams are front runners and do have the financial muscle necessary to
go testing week after week.
So Damon Hill was able to climb from his car up to the Canadian Grand Prix and say we need
to get this fixed and find that three weeks later at the French round of the series it
had been fixed.
He still hadn't beaten Schumacher but he finished and finished second and the effort the team
were putting in behind Hill and Coulthard was visible to outsiders.
Currently at the top of the Premier League Benetton's effort is clearly visible to anyone
who visits their headquarters in Oxfordshire.
In this 17 acre site more than 200 people labour away in the kind of isolated splendour
that concentrates the mind and just one look at the place tells you it was conceived by
someone who asked only one question, how much to win the world championship and then wrote
the cheque as soon as he was given the answer.
The results took a while coming but they're here now and you can understand why Benetton
had no shyness about putting them on display for the benefit of any visitors who walked
through the door of a factory built with winning in mind.
It's definitely a positive sign of the Benetton family wants to be in formal one with the
concept of winning races to be world champion and that's what we've done last year and
we hope we can maintain that for the next following years.
The size of Benetton at the moment, okay you said Pacific is probably another size of the
scale but you've got Ferrari which is probably around 500 people, you've got McLaren which
is probably 350 people, Williams I know is a lot more than us probably around 300 people
so we are what we believe is the right number to do the job right.
But Benetton too employ large numbers of people like the rest of the big four, they do as
much as they can in house which is why the number of staff here is about four times the
number of people going to the race.
We go around 45 people including marketing that's the normal number, to split the company
you can say okay it's around 40 people in the design, between design, R&D and electronics
and wind tunnel is around 40 people and you've got probably another 130 people based in the
factory more or less and then you've got the race team and the testing and the marketing
and the accounts, that's basically how the company splits.
Though Formula One appears in public on just 16 weekends a year the task of preparing the
race cars is year long.
We produce normally around 7, 8 cars a year, it depends on how many times you do during
the season but obviously it's an evolution of the car every two weeks, you know every
race a week is something new comes apart but at the chances if you don't have too many
chances you probably do with 8, 7, 8.
Once again you get a glimpse of the massive industry which supports the Formula One race
programme and you know why the top teams are often collected under the heading of the big
four, they each employ 100 plus people in a massive purpose built factory and each of
them have a financial turnover which cannot possibly be less than 50 million dollars.
Now we know, we believe that we can do it and we can do it again and we can do it again
and we established as one of the top teams that Denetton in the past was never established
by that so you obviously you work in totally different perspectives, you don't go races
for the finish in the points, you go there with the concept of winning the race and if
you don't win the race you get very upset.
So this is the difference when you are in the top and when you are in the middle or
in the back, when you know how to win or you've been able to win you're enjoying winning
and you know number two is the first loser basically.
science museum in London, McLaren International launched their Neil Oakley Designed Challenger
for 1995, typically of McLaren the car bristles with new ideas and high technology in engineering,
electronics and aerodynamics.
McLaren put high emphasis on the fact that the MP410 has a higher content of carbon fibre
in its manufacture than any previous McLaren or they believe any other current Formula
One car but that's only part of the story.
This is a car of many parts and what you're about to see is an unrivaled look at exactly
how McLaren put it together.
This is McLaren at Woking in England, this is where we design and build the Marble McLaren
Mercedes Formula One car.
Let's go and have a closer look inside.
This is the reception area of McLaren International, the trophies represent four decades of involvement
in Formula One and 104 Grand Prix victories.
These are the cars that have achieved most of the Grand Prix victories and represent
the Formula One evolution of Formula One design from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s.
This is the McLaren Research and Development Department, it's here they're working on
ideas not only for the current car but also new ideas for the future.
We have in here a special cooling wind tunnel that's used for testing the cooling efficiency
of the radiators, they have the model shop for the 1 third scale models and materials
testing and here this is the Instron 4-poster test rig where it's possible to monitor a
car's performance over the whole duration of a Grand Prix in simulated form.
This is the design office, the 1995 Marble McLaren Mercedes was designed 100% on CAD
CAM system, it takes three months from the start of the design through to completion
of the manufacturing process.
CAD CAM is computer aided design and computer aided manufacture, the car is designed with
computer vision CAD 5 software on a Sun Spark station.
There is a direct link from the design office through to the manufacturing area downstairs
and it's an integrated network to minimise the time delay and also to avoid data misinterpretation.
And now we're going to go into the factory and see the race bays where after each race
the cars are completely stripped down and then totally rebuilt.
Here you see the cars that have just come back from a race, they've only arrived back
the day before, now they're totally being stripped down, this has just come back from
a recent race that's now being rebuilt.
The gearbox has been taken off, they're taking off all the suspension parts, the carbon fibre
suspension will be taken to the R&D department to be proof tested and then the lower suspension
will be crack tested and the whole of the gearbox will be completely rebuilt in the
gearbox department.
To make sure that the gearbox is very compact, the reverse gear is actually positioned outside
of the actual gearbox and then for starting the car the starter probe goes into this section
of the rear part of the gearbox.
The engine is mounted as a fully stressed member of the chassis and you can see here
that the engine is mounted onto these six bolts and bolts directly onto the back of
the chassis.
There is gold leaf on the back of the chassis here to reflect the heat back into the engine
away from the fuel tank.
The fuel is kept in a bag tank which is inside here, this is made of a rubber and Kevlar
material that's self absorbing in the event of an impact and after each race this will
be completely taken out of the car and inspected.
This is the section where the fuel housing will go in when they're doing the refuelling
structure.
You can see here on the back is where the electronics will actually be bolted.
This is the deformable structure which is to protect the driver, this is made of collo
carbon fibre and is then injected with a series of silicon bowls and this actually has to
go all the way to America to be injected and then he's brought back and then bonded onto
the chassis.
This is a new element that's been introduced in the regulations in 1995.
Behind the driver is a self absorbent pad which is designed to cushion the driver so
his head should not hit the back of the chassis and cause injury.
If you press it softly it goes in very softly and if you hit it it absorbs all of the impact.
As you can see there's not a lot of space in there for the driver, there's only sufficient
space at the front for two pedals, the accelerator and the brake, the clutch being mounted on
the steering wheel.
The dash would normally fit on here and then the steering wheel would bolt directly onto
this column here.
Then the driver would take the steering wheel out of the car to get out for ease but all
of the electronics that are on the steering wheel are mounted straight onto this point
at the front here.
Like the other big teams McLaren has its own machine shop where it can make engineering
parts from scratch, how to forge bar and rod or from castings which are bought in.
McLaren also make their own carbon fibre parts, another facility they have in common with
the larger and longer established teams and it's worthy of examination all by itself.
Later on we'll be at DPS composites, the biggest and best known independent supplier to the
British race car industry who manufacture components in sizes ranging from tiny to huge.
Carbon fibre is extensively used in the car's construction, this is the chassis area of
the car, carbon fibre is about five times the lightness of steel but about twice the
strength and the whole weight of this chassis is about 40 kilos and it will take about ten
man days to actually build a new chassis.
And this is the fuel tank, very light, it's made of rubber and Kevlar, extremely light,
you see it's made of flexible material and this will be taken out of the car.
In fact this is a much smaller tank than we've had in previous years, this is only 130 litres
whereas in previous years it's been 230, the reason this is for the reintroduction of refuelling.
Interesting thing is it's flexible, it's not like a normal road tank which would be made
of a solid material, there is no ball in there to check the amount of fuel that's actually
left in the tank.
What actually happens, how they measure the fuel flow is it's done by counting the number
of squirts effectively that go into the engine, they count the injection and this is calibrated
by computer so you know what the fuel flow of the engine actually is.
This after a race will be completely taken out, checked and then squeezed up and put
back into the chassis.
The focal point of interest in the tarp isn't of course the fuel tank but the driver and
his environment, basically a dashboard and steering wheel.
This is the dashboard of the car, made of carbon fibre, this is the rev counter, it
starts at 6000, goes up to 17000, the operational rev range of the car is about from 13000 up
to almost 16000 revs.
The buttons here, this is for the neutral button for the gearbox, the hollow section
here is for altering the front and rear brake balance, this is for the fire extinguisher
in the event of there being any fire, for turning the condition on, a switch for monitoring
the radio for turning the volume up and down, the lights that are used on the rear of the
car in wet conditions to be able to turn those on and then switches to the drinks button,
it has the facility there but so far this year the drivers haven't actually used it.
This is the steering wheel from Nigel Mansell's car, the buttons, this is the button for controlling
the pit lane speed because you have a cutting so they know there's a 120km speed limit
in the pit lane, the middle button is for neutral and this switch here is for the radio
and then these two switches are for the fuel and for the gearbox.
The driver changes gear by two flipper switches that are on either side of the steering wheel,
on the right hand side is to change up, on the left hand side is to change down and it's
a semi automatic six speed gearbox.
The bottom two buttons are the clutch, the car only has the accelerator and the brake
and being semi automatic the clutch is only needed to actually start the car, the reason
we have it on either side depending on whether the driver's spin he can easily move his hands
to inject the clutch and on the top here this is the quick release button for the steering
wheel for the driver to get out and all the electronics for the steering wheel are controlled
down the centre section here which goes straight onto the steering column.
That's almost a complete car, later on we'll follow the engine to Ilmore and consider engines
separately so the only thing left is to paint it up and send it on its way.
This is the paint shop preparation area, here are chassis being prepared, we repaint the
chassis every two to three races, be very careful with the amount of paint that's actually
used on the car, maybe only 120 microns to save weight.
The money and the man power is all aimed in the same direction, in Formula One the name
of the game is winning and nothing else matters, second place is just first loser and a laces
Montreal win puts Ferrari back on top of the list of all time winners with one more victory
than McLaren.
By far the most secretive team in the pit lane, Ferrari is also the most successful
with 105 Grand Prix wins to its credit, but then the team was established in 1948 and
Enzo Ferrari's personal credentials go back to the Alfa Romeo team of 1926.
But Scuderia Ferrari lost direction after the death of Il Commendatore and endured a
wilderness period of 59 races without a win until Gerhard Berger broke the drought at
Hockenheim in 1994.
Now with Formula One's most powerful engine, a 17,000 rpm screamer plus a beautiful and
increasingly effective chassis created in Guildford by John Barnard, Ferrari are on
course for further success.
With Luca di Montezemolo at the top, John Todd organising the race team in the way only
John Todd can organise a team and Niki Lauda adding his own expertise, Ferrari's Sora
Lacey take his first Grand Prix victory in Montreal in 1995 and there were clearly more
to come.
Although budget can scarcely be a problem for Maranello, they still maintain close links
with the UK.
Design guru John Barnard still works from Surrey and uses local contractors for items
under development.
Spend any time at Heathrow's Terminal One and you'll soon spot the couriers hand carrying
unwieldy shapes onto Alitalia flights.
Over a period of time almost every team has called on the services of DPS Composites,
a Surrey based company which makes carbon fibre parts for every formula you can think
of and a vast range of other items.
Carbon fibre was invented in the 60s at what was then the Royal Aircraft Establishment
at Farnborough by three British scientists, Leslie Phillips, Bill Watt and Bill Johnson.
They were part of a team searching for ultra high strength materials for aerospace usage
and they came up with this very light and strong textile material which relies on the
correct alignment of carbon atoms, the very building blocks of life itself and a curing
temperature of 5000 degrees centigrade for its creation.
Nowadays carbon fibre is the building block of Formula One.
10,000 tonnes of it are produced annually for medical, sports and the aerospace industries.
But carbon fibre is the literal backbone of Formula One, having taken over from aluminium
as the material of choice.
Yes, it's a better material in a lot of respects.
The other advantage is you can actually mould very complex shapes a lot easier than you
can form flat sheets of aluminium into complex shapes.
On the other hand it's not easy to work with, requiring special skills and special equipment
and it's far from cheap.
It's a relatively new skill so the labour rates are reasonably high, there's not that
many good carbon fibre people around.
The material itself is quite expensive, for example a square metre of carbon cloth would
be in the region of 25 pounds and that one square metre would produce a sheet which is
only ten thousandths of an inch thick.
All of which puts the price of components the size of floor pans into some kind of perspective.
It depends what you're building, if you're building a small simple component such as
a brake duct we have here, it's two or three layers of the carbon cloth, there's no honeycomb
or no section to it, but being a small component with lots of shapes it's plenty of solenoid.
If you're building for example a Formula One chassis which has to withstand much higher
loads and the various crash tests that things have to go through, you build it in a sandwich
construction which is a skin of carbon fibre, then a piece of honeycomb which may be ten,
fifteen, twenty millimetres thick and then another skin of carbon fibre.
So you're actually forming a thick section but at the same time it's very light and very
strong.
Basically you put it in a bag and suck all the air out which provides a vacuum which
is one atmosphere, fourteen pounds per square inch on the bag.
You then put it in the autoclave and pressurise the autoclave up to maybe a hundred pounds
per square inch.
So that's the extra pressure you're providing.
It needs to be in the bag to actually squeeze it all together.
The autoclave provides the curing process.
The resin, depending on the resin system we use, basically the normal resin system cures
at 120 degrees centigrade and it takes about four or five hours for a cycle.
Finally you've heated it up, kept it at two hours at 120 degrees and then cooled down.
If carbon fibre has a drawback it's that components made from it can't be altered.
An aluminium part can be amended by a craftsman but the dimensions and shape of a carbon fibre
part are unalterably fixed once it's been made.
That means that except in extreme emergencies like the one affecting McLaren and Mansell
the size and shape of major items like tub and chassis parts tends to be settled soonest
and least amended.
Chassis wise most of the things I think pretty much finalise at fairly early on.
Things like wings and bodywork and floors are constantly evolved depending on how good
the car is.
Because of carbon fibre's unchanging nature you must be certain that what you make is
dimensionally exact and DPS must be getting it right because over a period of years they've
made parts for just about everyone in the business.
McLaren, Sauvers, Pinsky, Leroux, Lotus and various other ones.
Some teams make their own carbon fibre parts.
That list now includes Benetton, Williams and McLaren and also Tyrrell whose manufacturing
process we've been looking at.
It's complex and requires specialist equipment but apart from that it's a system that would
be familiar to almost anyone who's filled a den on their car with a fibreglass filler.
The basic process is the same as regular fibreglass work.
You have a resin, you have a fibre to reinforce that resin and it's cured either by time or
by heat.
But our process takes a lot longer because of the types of resin we use.
The whole cure cycle in the autoclave is four or five hours and the manufacturing time for
a component can be anything from a few hours to several weeks depending on the complexity
of it.
A chassis for example, a Formula One chassis is something like 1100 man hours in each chassis.
But it would take ages to make a floor pan from P38 too and it would be heavier and it
would break when you picked it up which may explain why carbon costs £25 a square metre.
1995 saw a brand new regime of regulations which obliged everyone to start with a clean
sheet of paper or more likely a blank computer screen to create their new cars for the season.
At Williams Adrian Newey was the man with the task of creating their new Challenger
for the year and with some success.
Obviously there are a number of things that have been changed since last year to do with
the regulation changes aerodynamics side and Adrian Newey and his people on the aerodynamics
side have come up with a different layout for the car because of the constraints of
the new aerodynamic regulations and as we were saying previously the results on average
seem quite good.
Harvey Postlethwaite said those regulations established criteria in which aerodynamics
were no longer the sole priority and they were a positive benefit, an opinion not universally
shared.
I think they were done in a bit of haste really.
They haven't done any harm and I don't think they've done as much good as really they should
have done.
A bit more attention should have been put into them before they were finally defined.
I think now the FIA are finding some of that with some of the testing they're doing at
Myra that really the safety aspect is not as big a step as what we all thought.
Directed by Postlethwaite Tyrell have veered away from the quest for downforce produced
by cunning interpretation of the rules and are looking elsewhere for mechanical grip,
hence the new and still secret Hydrolink suspension system and the possible inclusion of last
year's viscous coupling diff to help get the car off the corner better.
Less downforce means less traction means less grip and putting the power down out of a corner
is where it will hurt the most and that's where Postlethwaite and the team are looking
now.
I think that we've had a massive amount of work to do over the winter because of the
regulation changes, all new cars for the ship, all born free cars are new this year and we
hope that these regulations will be kept stable for a few years now because it will enable
us to develop the cars we've got rather than having to build all new ones every year.
Yeah the regulation changes meant that we really had to start from the beginning, they
moved the driver around quite a lot for safety reasons and aerodynamic of the car from very
big changes to just the downforce from the car to just the speed round corners.
The obvious reason for that is that regulation changes which are as sweeping as those the
teams were obliged to adopt for 94 and 95 are not cheap to implement, only the well
funded teams also have the budget to exploit them as opposed to just adopt them.
Every time you change the regulation, particularly radical changes like we've done this year,
it means there is very little you can use from the previous years so that means a totally
completely new car and obviously there is a cost implication in there.
If the regulation is stable, some of the parts of the car you may use it for the following
year.
Well it's the concept, at least you don't spend the time to design and to develop.
The problems posed by regulation changes for 1995 don't only affect the chassis designers
and aerodynamicists, they involve the engine makers too as the new 3 litre formula imposes
its own set of imperatives as well as allowing designers more freedom in other areas.
We have done a complete redesign of the 3 litre engine.
We are one of the only manufacturers which have done so.
I guess the decision was made together with McLaren because of the step bottom they have
in the car.
The step bottom is over a width of 300 to 500 mm and we built the engine in a way that
it fits that particular aerodynamic package.
Like the car designers, Mario Iliin now believes that stability is essential for future development
if there is to be real benefit for consumers from Formula One and that the 3 litre formula
will lead to more improvements in the future.
I think nothing is ideal but at the moment the decision has been made.
We are on a 3 litre engine beyond the year 2000 and I think it's important to have stability
and that's what we have to live with and I think it's very good to have made that decision
to have for several years an engine where we can build and develop rather than changing
the specification every year which is obviously an extreme cost to everybody and I think it
will probably even drive so many factories away from wages.
Yes obviously you have to choice weight, 10, 12.
The configuration I think is almost a must because the chassis and the engine are as
a bolted together unit so the engine is taking all the chassis loads from the rear axle
to the front of the chassis and you have to make a stiff package from a torsion point
of view as well from a bending.
You are almost forced into a reconfiguration.
The car designers share Mario Illion's feelings about stability especially after such a long
period of it was followed by frantic changes putting design teams under enormous workloads.
Because it's such a big change in regulations you know we end up with a small team here
really relatively, we get 8 people in the drawing office and we end up we haven't got
the manpower to catch up with the other people that have got 3 or 4 times the amount of people.
If the regulations are fairly stable then we can catch up slowly on them because there
is not really that much room for them to go ahead.
Because the regulations are so different, at the beginning of this year everybody had
a baseline car to the new regulations.
You know Williams, Benetton, Ferrari, their cars now are completely different from what
they were at the beginning of the year because of the manpower and the money they have.
So we haven't run forward as fast as they have, so in effect we have gone backwards
but we are hopefully going to address that situation quickly.
But the changes were made with the very best of intentions though some seemed almost inconsequential
like the quarter inch thick sheet of wood under the car which looks unlikely to make
that much difference.
The reason that regulation was put in last year was to stop the cars hitting the ground
so hard.
A lot of people, drivers mainly were complaining about the fact the car was just beating itself
to death on the ground and because of that you could get some mechanical failures.
The reason it was put there was to be a piece of wood underneath the car that you could
only wear a certain amount of it.
It was a pretty good regulation I believe to control the car from hitting the ground.
It lost a little bit of downforce because of it being a step underneath the car.
So all in all it was a reasonable way to go.
But then a lot of people had problems because the car was hitting for whatever reason wearing
it away and at the end of the race they were deemed illegal.
Which was fact, that was the regulation.
So it was fact, everybody had the same opportunity to make it not happen.
But after that then the FIA changed its mind and decided that it would allow us to put
skids, steel skids underneath the plank.
So now we've got the plank of wood, we've got things to protect the plank of wood and
it's really a lost cause.
The reason that things were put there has been done away with.
It's not really necessary anymore.
I think the original concept was quite good because the car is hitting the ground all
the time, it definitely doesn't harm and it doesn't do the drivers' minds any good.
So I think they shouldn't have changed their mind that quickly on it, but they did.
Some people feel that the changes have produced a backward movement and taken Formula One
backwards and set it alongside IndyCar.
We've gone back a long way.
If you'd left the regulations alone as they were in the early 80s with the ground effect
cars you know you would have been seeing lap time 20 seconds quicker than what they are
now.
So you have to drag it back with every now and again.
Comparing it to IndyCar is a very difficult thing, it's a very different discipline,
it's like comparing soccer and rugby really.
You still play with a ball but the aim is different.
We have had to build a new car for a new set of regulations and it meets the criteria that
we want.
IndyCar is doing it for a completely different reason.
They are a customer car company sport, we are trying to do it as a business, individual
business.
Whenever we run the races there's 13 different teams, 13 different cars, whereas IndyCar
has probably two different chassis running in a race.
So it's done for a different reason.
IndyCar regulations are much, much more controlled.
The book of the regulations is probably 50 times what we have.
But everything is defined in it, our regulations are a little bit vague.
So there's room for interpretation which is really what you see all the arguments about,
about the interpretation of the rules, not the actual rules.
And every interpretation of some of these things will be different.
So as the FIA intended, things do seem to have taken a step backwards from the days
when a car could glue itself to the roof of the Monaco tunnel at 100 miles an hour and
the 1995 regulation changes have produced exactly the desired effect.
This year's car against the car we built at the beginning of last year, we're probably
running on about 50% of the downforce.
Now, you're talking about that, you're still talking about creating 150 miles an hour,
sort of one and a half tonnes.
There used to be an old philosophy of driving on the roof Monaco tunnel, but I think if
you tried to do that now you'd probably end up in the harbour.
But I mean, it's just a matter of speed, it can still be done.
You just have to make the car work more mechanically because you have less assistance from aerodynamic
forces.
And I think as time goes by, I think by the time we get to the end of this year, we'll
probably be in the same level as we were at the end of last year, which will be probably
a 20% increase as the year went past.
And I think then we'll have a winter development and then we'll come back again out of next
year.
But I think really the FIA will probably try to put a top on that again by doing something
not as dramatic as it was for this year, but something just to sort of don't die of
frustration, I keep saying.
I mean, it's just the same thing as building a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine or anything,
it's an engineering product, you're trying to make it better to do a better job.
And ours is related to lap time, not that in fact you can do a whitewash with 30 degree
temperature water or something.
It's the same thing really, we'll always try to improve it.
I don't think you'll ever see the day when the lap times will, unless the regulations
change, where the lap times will stop and not actually get any quicker, it'll always
be development, be it in tyres, brakes, engines, gearboxes, chassis, there's so many variables
there that you can always find that little bit.
The job of designing a Formula One car is more complex than it ever was before.
No longer a one man job, it's a team effort now, but as always there's one hand on the
helm steering the ship, and that one man can still provide the inspiration and ideas which
make a car into a winner.
Certainly Harvey has been an innovator, and at the time that he was with us, he was certainly
an innovator, he was a very good innovator, he was very good at that, and before he came
to us, and now on his return to us, we are doing things that we weren't able to do before
he returned.
And the additional budget that we have from having him not be on board is a neighbour
in us to do that.
Harvey Posselthwaite gave us the anhedral front wing and then John Barnard made it the
raised nose which everyone else has adopted.
The drawback is extra weight and this year Pacific came up with their so-called platypus
nose with as much wing area as the raised nose but without the weight of the supports.
McLaren came up with a controversial mid-wing which many other teams had tried and discounted
because it brought more problems than it solved, especially mid-corner stability or rather
instability.
By Montreal McLaren finally admitted defeat and dropped it themselves.
Most observers felt its design purpose was more to do with air boxes than aerofoils in
any case.
All the money and all the technology in the world won't replace something that's got
a bit of a foresight.
But to be honest, nowadays you've got to compete with a team, you can't compete as an individual
and the teamwork is a very important part of it.
Each individual can come up with his own flash of brilliance for a given thing but it has
to fit in with the teamwork, we all have to operate as a team.
In days gone by whenever a design team operated with three or four people there was room for
one of those guys to have his flash of brilliance but it only worked because he was a very big
percentage of the team that was there and now each individual is a much smaller percentage
so someone has to collect them together and head off in the direction.
To be honest it's more of an organisational job now than actually sitting down and thinking
about what's the next step, can we reach Mars or not.
A factory engine deal is worth a lot of money to a Formula One team but there was a time
when just about everyone in the pit lane had one of these, it's a Cosworth V8.
Now it's only a few as the bigger teams try to tie themselves with a big factory which
will supply engines and technical support.
Latching onto the Peugeot engine after McLaren pulled out of its deal with the French maker
was a good move for Jordan.
That leaves Tyrrell with Yamaha engines and whether or not that's much of a coup for Tyrrell
remains to be seen but Yamaha's commitment to Formula One is clear.
And the fact that Renault have chosen to supply two first class teams with its engines is
a decision viewed as controversial by many and it's seen as a coup for Flavio Briatore,
Venetian's flamboyant boss and a blow for Frank Williams.
That McLaren should form a Grand Prix partnership with Mercedes is viewed with mixed feelings
the Mercedes Formula One engine ought to be as successful as their world sports car power
plant but hasn't been.
And the Mercedes engine is really an Ilmore power plant designed and produced by the company
which has had so much success in IndyCar that it's dominated the American racing scene for
some time but as we all know Formula One's a different animal.
It's different yes, in Indy we have obviously Penske as our factory team, our Mercedes factory
team that is a similar situation but then we have got several customers on top of that
so we are covering a much bigger market and there are three chassis competing against
each other so the difference is really that you have got almost a kit car in some respect
for some teams and then building the car around the existing engines which are on the market.
Ilmore's a massive place employing 200 people bigger than most Formula One teams and this
is hardly a quarter of Ilmore's factory, a place so vast it now makes crankshafts in
minutes short-cutting a process that used to last month and uses so much power it needs
its own electricity substation so as not to black out the industrial estate and half of
Northampton.
The equipment and commitment evident here make it obvious why Mercedes and McLaren are
happy to be involved but even so McLaren's take up of 68 engines in a season is massive
almost equal to the entire IndyCar program.
We have expanded a little bit during last year and this year and I guess we still have
to expand some more but it's not really changing the way we have gone forward up to now.
The degree of care in manufacture is almost unbelievable.
This machine built by Zeiss has components for inspection bolted to a 5 ton block of
granite that floats on computer controlled blasts of compressed air in order to eliminate
vibration and it has to.
The ruby tipped probe checks components as mundane as water pumps and alternators to
tolerances as low as 0.2 of a micron and the micron in case you've never seen one is about
1.50th the diameter of a human hair.
I wouldn't say it's better than any machine but you need obviously the human element you
need still the brain power to make the machinery working and I mean you see we have computers
around here but you still have to have the right input otherwise you're not going to
get what you want and that's where the human element comes into it.
You still have to think as hard as you did before even you have a computer helping you.
The modern Formula 1 engine is an intrinsic part of the car.
It's a stressed member that becomes part of the chassis once it's bolted into place.
Its size, weight and position will all affect the nature of the car as a package and it
may not be that much longer before engine designers sit side by side with chassis designers
when a new car is created.
No I wouldn't put it to that extreme.
Obviously there is still an interface between car and engine but the package I think is
to a degree developed together because they're finding out from their aerodynamicist what
is important, what is giving them a gain and the next stage is how can we adapt the engine
to get into that package best or we find a benefit on the engine and then the question
is how can we adapt it into the car without compromising the car's aerodynamic performance.
The other thing that can't be far away is the advent of new materials like alloys and
ceramics in engine construction.
I think ceramics less so.
A lot has been talked about ceramics but you can use ceramics in some areas for reduced
wear or reduced friction that type of thing but not to the degree people were talking
about it.
I think that was a little bit more talking than actually what's happening in reality
but new materials for sure will come in but I think they're more in composite materials,
fibre reinforced materials and that sort of thing.
It takes about six months to design and build a new engine from scratch to prototype and
about two weeks to make each one once the program is established.
Ilmore do the lot from start to finish buying very little apart from castings and electrical
components needed to assemble things like the 12,000 pound wiring loom for the fuel
injection system.
In fact there are about 50,000 pounds worth of electronic parts on the engine when it's
completely assembled and then it's put in its little box and sent back to McLaren ready
for another weekend of racing or testing.
The 1995 regulations put strict limits on tyre usage at any race meeting.
All drivers are limited to seven sets of slicks per weekend making their allocation another
tactical weapon in the race strategy.
There are a few other ways in which tyres can be used to win races or at least bid for
race victory.
All Formula One tyres are now made by Goodyear and conform to the regulations which allow
a maximum width of 15 inches and 26 inches in diameter.
The factory produces about 25,000 tyres in total and around 13,000 of them will be used
in Grand Prix during the season.
Another 7,000 or more in testing by teams and by Goodyear themselves.
Before each race Goodyear decides whether the circuit pulls for one dry compound or
a choice of two from a range of four possible.
They'll take 900 tyres if it's one choice and if necessary add a further 600 tyres of
a second choice compound.
And they always take 600 rain tyres.
So they'll have between 1500 and 2100 tyres at any Grand Prix.
They've been racing in Formula One for 30 years and have won 300 plus races as well
as 300 plus pole positions, 22 Drivers World Championships and 23 Instructor's Crowns as
well.
Far from freezing development, Goodyear's tyre monopoly has led to a stable situation
in which the development engineers have been able to work on producing constructions and
compounds which have been demanded by car designers like Harvey Possevthwaite who can
no longer rely on aerodynamics to produce grip but must find higher levels of mechanical
grip to compensate for the regulation enforced reduction in downforce.
Goodyear's commitment to Formula One in terms of finance and personnel is considerable and
continuous.
Despite the enormous publicity which Formula One Racing receives worldwide, it's difficult
to see how there's any direct benefit for the company being involved in a programme
of this nature.
Goodyear have adopted a direct strategy and named their race tyres and their road tyres
as Eagles and hope for an immediate marketing link.
Regulation changes affecting the whole of Formula One have also affected the tyres as
we've heard.
For example, the fuel stops which take place in the races now mean that tyre changes happen
as well so the tyres themselves no longer have to last a whole race but at most only
half of it or maybe even only a third.
Even though the limiting factor is the speed at which the fuel tank can be topped up, putting
an end to McLaren's five second tyre stops, the pit stop is still a ten second affair
and the intricate ballet of the technicians as they lift the car on jacks, remove four
tyres, pit four new ones and add a hundred plus litres of fuel is still fast and furious.
The sheer scale of a top class Formula One operation is breathtaking.
While smaller teams may operate on ten or twelve million dollars, there are others who
spend that much money on the driver alone.
I think some of the drivers are still overpaid so I'm not sure I would pay even if I had
the ability to but certainly some of the drivers you're probably referring to that I've had,
I'm sure they're not in the highest paid leave at the moment and I'm a great believer in
giving the young guys a chance.
If I was in the position some of the teams obviously politically you come under fire
from your engine suppliers or sponsors and there's lots of things to consider when you're
in that level but I would always try and go for the younger guys and if I had the money
to do it I would pay the guys that I thought were worth it, fair pay.
But there's no doubt that a good driver is definitely worth paying for especially since
the regulations mean 1995 cars are a return to the days when a drivers sensitivity and
natural talent makes more of a difference.
Robbed of fly by wire gizmos these cars are ideally suited as a showcase for drivers who
have innate ability like Alan Prost and bitterly ironic the Untouchable, Ayrton Senna and as
a bonus they're more entertaining to watch and to drive.
Yeah I would say that they would enjoy driving them more at the moment because the car will
move around quite a lot more, it's slide about more, it's like driving in the wet, the car's
sliding and you're not going so quickly.
I think it's brought a level of driver that has to have more driving finesse, the car
hasn't got the grip and there were some of the drivers that used to drive a few years
ago and they drove with the fact that the engineer was able to tell them you can go
around that corner 10 miles an hour quicker and they would go around that corner 10 miles
an hour quicker because the car had enough grip to do it.
But those days are sort of gone now, you're driving with a lot more feel and I think that's
where you see the confident feeling driver coming forward.
I mean Schumacher is a typical example, Lease is a typical example.
I think they do a good job because they have a lot of finesses in the car, they're not
just driving it on pure muscle.
Pure muscle nowadays I think has gone away, you need some finesse.
1995 should have been a brilliant valedictory season for Britain's most recent world champion
but while McLaren devoted unimaginable effort into building a new chassis for Nigel Mansell,
what should have been a beautiful friendship dissolved into bitter disappointment.
You've got the history behind those quantities because look at Mercedes, what a fantastic
company they are.
They are Ilmore, the people there, so you know the engine is going to be good.
How strong it will be we'll have to wait but for sure whatever power it's got we're going
to get more power as the year goes on.
McLaren, look at the history behind that, fantastic.
And you know I've got a little bit of history too so together I think it's a formidable
force.
Sadly, Mansell's history appears to have ended with his half season at McLaren but as the
old guard makes way for the new there's no room for tears.
Michael Schumacher was one of three drivers who graduated into Formula One from the Mercedes
training school but he's the one who's emerged the strongest.
And though Benetton looked to be the strongest team in 95 there's little doubt that Williams
made the right driver choices for the season choosing to stay with Damon Hill and bring
in David Coulthard.
Very pleased undoubtedly.
I mean Damon is showing a continuation of the speed and maturity that he showed in the
last two races of 1994 and really one's view of Damon continues to be enhanced with every
race that he does.
He's got an amazing record for I think 11 race wins out of 36 or 37 race starts but
really only 34 or so race starts in a reasonably competitive car.
And David obviously still not having completed a full season of Formula One it's remarkable
to be running up at such a high level near or at the front and OK there have been one
or two little slips but I think that's only to be expected so early on but we're all expecting
very good results from him for the future.
That opinion is largely shared by Frank Williams who knows that the future of his team and
others now depends at least in part on its ability to recognise and attract young talent
and that the Hill Coulthard pairing reflects that.
Well you use the word maturity is that he has become a very mature driver who is accustomed
to winning and the significance of that is that he's able to handle being in the lead,
he knows how to come from behind to attack and obtain the lead and whilst in the lead
he's less likely because it's not an all new thing for him to make mistakes and lose control.
We're very pleased to see David join the team for this year.
There's no question that the decision was taken was the right one, no question at all.
But are Hill, Coulthard, Schumacher, Hacken and Ander, Lacey the only new Premier League
drivers of Formula One or are there others?
Given unlimited budget who would the team owners employ?
Who would they choose if they were to play Fantasy Grand Prix?
No, you can't ask me that because Formula One is not dealing in Fantasy, it's dealing
in the two facts of life.
Well I'd start with Bertrand Gatlin and Andrea Montelminy.
I'd be happy to see people like David Coulthard, I'd like to see Christian Filippaldi again
in the car.
I know if you, Giorgi Genné, a Spanish driver I believe, had a lot of talent.
It would be quite interesting to have the ability to go around and pick what you think
is a good driver.
I still believe there's potential in people like Gage O. It's all a question of the right
environment to develop.
But I mean there's a number of young drivers.
If you said to me who would you pick out of the top boys that would probably be a harder
one to be quite honest.
Nigel Mansell is not on your shop in this?
No, Nigel Mansell wouldn't be on my shop.
No.
My writing has never been fun to me actually. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed it. It's
a challenge and it's only good when you're winning and if that happens you always want
to do better. So therefore it's a need more than something that's fun.
I disagree with that. I think it's always been fun and the only reason that we've been
in it for this last 27 years is because we find it fun and we are very fortunate in that
we've been able to earn our living doing the job that we like doing.