China: Nick Fry in the Friday Five

By Phil Huff
October 14 2005

BAR Honda's Nick Fry sat in on the Friday Five press conference today, chatting to the assembled media about the Honda buy-in, his thoughts on 2005, and revealing his caring side.

Nick, first of all, the takeover of Honda, how much are things going to change?

We are told not much. The basic structure of the company will stay the same, the people in the key positions at the moment will remain, I think what it will mean to us is more application of Honda resource and technology. We already have a good linkage with the guys in Tochigi which is where Honda's main research headquarters are, but I think that will just be reinforced so hopefully that will help us improve our performance yet further, so fundamentally more of the same.

What about this supposed second team, how disruptive is that likely to be?

We are absolutely going to minimize. Honda have obviously supplied a second team with an engine in the past and the ability to do that again not only remains but has also improved, so that side we are not too concerned about and the other team, the objective is that they would have the same engines, a V8 rather than a V10, and obviously the other commitment the car manufacturer has made is for a level of technical support and that is necessary these days, it is very difficult to just hand over an engine and we will give that as well but we are very much going to ring fence that, we can't really let it disrupt the efforts of our team so we will decide with the other team what we need, which we haven't done yet, and provide it, but it will be in a very defined fashion.

Are you expecting to have to build new chassis as well?

Yet to be decided.

Could you briefly sum up how you feel your team's season has gone?

Challenging, I think, is probably the best word. For us very much a season of two halves, as it were. The first half of the season was very difficult for a whole variety of issues, as people will be fully aware of. Since the Indianapolis problems, clearly we've scored points, and Jenson has done exceptionally well scoring in every race but clearly not as many as we would have liked, and the competition has been significantly stronger this year than it was last year. Not only Ron with McLaren, but also Renault, and Toyota and Ferrari and Christian's [Horner, Red Bull] team have done well in various races, so there's been a lot of competition.

We would have liked to have done better, but we've just got to continue to work harder. Our team has only been in existence for seven years, and the first few of those were fairly difficult and we're up against people, two of which are sitting in the front row, who have been doing this for a long time with hugely well-established teams. We're getting better, the structure of the company is better, the Honda buy-in is critical to us and we are just going to continue to battle like hell.

I think this challenging year for us has probably put us in good stead in lots of ways. I think the team has stuck together, which I'm very proud of. Everyone has pulled together, everyone has kept their chin up and that's absolutely everyone: sponsors, people in the factory, drivers and I think that will stand us in good stead for the future. Challenging but a learning experience that will benefit us.

What about the possibility of 20 races? Would you think that to be too many?

I think that this year we have a lot of examples of people starting to say I just don't want to do this any more. It is impossible to compensate them for that many weekends away. Money doesn't do it. The guys get days off during the week, but their mates aren't around during the week, their kids are at school, the wife may be working or doing other things and so it is very difficult for us to say in compensation we will give you something which is as valuable. We simply cannot do that.

I think it's relatively easy in the scheme of things for the team principals because we are in an enviable position, but a lot of the people are actually away a lot longer than we are. I think 19 has been trying. I don't think you can look at it in terms of the number of races. I think the way that they are arranged does have a bearing on it: a lot of back-to-backs or even potentially triple-headers means people are away for a long period of time, so if we are going to have as many again, then potentially we could try and arrange them in a slightly more family-friendly manner.

We are talking about large numbers of people here and we want to keep their motivation up and we want to keep them happy at home as well.