Interview with Patrick Head

By Andrew Hooper
May 9 2002

	Head Question & Answer
	Will you be closer to Ferrari this weekend? I think that we should be, but it’s very difficult to say before the weekend. We’ve been disappointed by our race pace since the Malaysian Grand Prix, but I hope that we can start to put that right here. What do you think of the A1-Ring? It’s very different to the Osterrichring that used to be the home of the Austrian Grand Prix. For starters, it is now a very short lap for a grand prix track – sub 70-seconds. As for the layout, the beginning of the lap is fairly straight forward, and it is only from the Bosch Kurve [half-way through] onwards that it begins to get a bit interesting with off-camber corners and the like. There are stories that you are building a new gearbox for FW24… This is the first I have heard about that. I read in a magazine that a German company is building it for us - well, all I can say is that the particular company mentioned has built a few gears for us in the past, but they are not doing anything for us now. There is no truth to the story. How realistic is it for some cost-cutting measures to be introduced into F1? Spending money for no reason isn’t right, but I hope that Williams as a company are good at spending the money that we have sensibly. We don’t have the budget of a Ferrari, so we have to be more careful, and I think that we are. Having said that, it is good to cut back on costs where possible and testing might be the right area to do this. It is very difficult to ban materials that we use because that would need unanimous agreement and have to be discussed at a rational meeting by the relevant engineers. The problem that we have is that if a team is capable of raising a certain amount of money, but are restricted by what it can spend it on, it will seek other areas in which to spend it. Truth be told, I don’t think cost cutting would alter a great deal in terms of where the teams are on the grid.