Bahrain: Nick Fry gets chatty

By Phil Huff
April 13 2007

Nick Fry sat in on the 'Friday Five' press conference today, not least to confirm that the rumours surrounding Ross Brawn are false, as RealHondaF1.com confirmed some some time ago. There was also the touchy subject about the car's current level of performance...

Can I ask you to summarise today because it looked quite dramatic. It all looked a bit busy?

It was a little bit busy! Obviously, we had pretty much the same car as we had last weekend, so we weren’t expecting too much. The day turned out pretty much as we expected with the exception obviously that Jenson lost his engine this afternoon and only got some very early runs. We could probably have done without that because we come here not in the best position at the moment.

We saw the guys working, was it the T-car with the engine off?

I don't think that was anything to do with Jenson's problem, just normal work.

What are the plans for curing the problems?

It's not really one thing unfortunately. The car is just short of grip. It's principally an aerodynamic issue although there are some mechanical changes we also want to make to the car. We will make some changes at Barcelona, principally a large number of aerodynamic parts. There will be more for Canada and we are in the process of testing those in the wind tunnel and elsewhere. There will be more after that, probably in Magny-Cours. I think it's just going to be a series of rolling changes, if you like, rather than one change which is going to fix the problem.

So rumours of a new car are greatly exaggerated?

I think it depends on what you mean by a new car. There are large parts of the car where we don't have any specially identified problem. The gearbox seems to work, the engine – with the exception of this afternoon – has been pretty reliable, the main part of the monocoque, albeit that we may have to alter things to make some changes to the aerodynamic shape. As far as we can tell, the rear suspension seems perfectly okay. We are going to have to change a reasonable amount. I wouldn't call it a new car but it's not going to be insubstantial either.

Is it true you have made an offer to Ross Brawn?

No, it's not true. I made one comment in Malaysia along the lines that I'm sure there are a number of people who might be interested in Ross. In my view he's an incredibly talented person and he would be an asset to most Formula One teams. I also added that I thought Ferrari would have some kind of arrangement with Ross. You don't let a person of that talent go without having something, whether it be written or verbal, and I was told that Jean [Todt] or Ferrari had confirmed that was the case. My personal view is that Ross is taking a well earned year's sabbatical. I'm sure there are a number of people interested in him but we will see what happens later in the year. Maybe he will go back to Ferrari and maybe he will go fly-fishing, I don't know. The team principals talk to a lot of people all the time and we are no exception, but obviously in our situation we have spoken to a number of technically adept people.

When the engine blew, the car was left, obviously, without the handbrake on and it started to roll backwards. The marshals took about four and a half minutes getting to it. I wondered how you felt about what looked like slipshod performance. We saw a close-up of you on the pit wall and you looked fairly pained by the whole thing.

Yeah, obviously having weak performance of the car is one thing but we didn't need the problem that we did have. I agree, I was looking slightly worried when the car started moving and was much relieved when it only moved six inches or whatever it moved and stopped moving again. Perhaps someone should have been there a bit quicker but they were there fairly shortly thereafter and if the car had been in imminent danger of running onto the track, one would have hoped that they would have moved a bit quicker.

Earth car. Nick, can you give us an update on the public response since you introduced the earth car in Australia?

Yeah, reaction has been mainly positive, obviously with a couple of exceptions which we expected. I think we said at the launch that the work we've done around the world investigating before we launched showed there would be, to be exact, six percent of the people who were cynical about it, and that about sums it up. The thing that for us is the best is that a lot of people who weren't previously interested in Formula One have come to us and it has sparked their interest and I think that's the most encouraging thing, that people who are not overly interested in cars or car racing or cars covered in logos, it's captured their imagination. And we've had some good events around it, one with a school in Australia. It's being used in advertisements to promote various products and there's more coming through the year. It's got off to a quicker start than we expected. This wasn't anticipated as an overnight success and other campaigns of this type have taken a couple of years to get off the ground, so the interest that came about before we went to Melbourne has continued since, in fact somewhat better than we expected and it has attracted commercially; I think we have some announcements to make over the next few weeks. We are talking to a lot of people who ordinarily wouldn't be interested in Formula One necessarily.

You've said you have been talking to technical people, partly because it's your job and partly because of your position. Do you foresee major changes or additions in that department?

We are always looking to strengthen the team, but these things, I think we all recognise, don't happen overnight. Even if you start talking to someone seriously, invariably if they are any good they do have existing contracts and they do have the usual gardening leave and the other things, so lead times on these things are, in most cases, relatively slow but we certainly need to strengthen the team in some areas.