Q: Next question, the rules. I would like to ask, first of all, the front row, if you feel happy that you have agreed on the rules and the back row, the fact that it is so late, how it affects you guys, as independents, presumably with smaller budgets than those in the front row. Can I ask you guys in the front row how you feel the rules meetings are going?
RB: I think the chassis regulations, almost by default, we have arrived at the solution. The FIA made a proposal, which was the proposal they intend to make in October, and I think everyone looked at it and it was very close to what a lot of us were prepared to accept, so I think on the chassis it has gone through, or will be going through. I think there is enough people in agreement to make it difficult for any alternatives to happen and, of course, everyone wants to get on with their cars. So, I think there is a reasonably substantial reduction in downforce that will reduce cornering speeds and certainly move in a direction of slowing the cars down.
Tyres, we have a solution that was proposed by the tyre companies, which is what the sporting regulations asked for. Michelin and Bridgestone got together and made the proposal so presumably that is settled now for next year.
I think on the engine we are in broad support of the two main proposals, which are the two-race engines and the 2.4-litre V8. It is just the timescale makes it quite expensive to do it. Obviously over a longer timescale it would have been a little bit more economic but I think the 2.4 V8 is necessary to reduce the speeds of the cars and I think the two-race engine ultimately will make it more economic for the teams with smaller budgets to operate so we need to support it. So I think it is pretty clear what is going to happen and on Sunday morning we have a Technical Working Group meeting to just go through some details, I believe they are going through some details, and I think most people now are building their cars for next year.

QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR

Q: (Mike Doodson - Mike Doodson Associates)
Q: It seems that the three guys on the front row know what the rules are and the three guys in the back row don’t know what the rules are. I may be wrong here but I wonder if you can be more explicit. Can the guys on the front row tell us what has been agreed in the TWG, what are the changes we’re likely to see next year, and I have a supplementary question which is that I understand Max Mosley placed a deadline – I think it was September 6, I may be wrong – and is that still in force?
RB: I think the aerodynamic regulations are virtually agreed. We’re crossing the Ts and dotting the Is, so I’m surprised that Eddie thinks we don’t have a set of regulations, because my understanding is we do and by a process, I’m pretty certain they’re the regulations which will go through, because I believe five or six teams have now written to the FIA saying that those are the regulations they want and therefore there is no other process in place for an alternative set of regulations. I think the tyre regulations are in place because Michelin and Bridgestone have written to the FIA and jointly asked for a solution which the FIA accepted. I think the only debate as far as I am concerned is the engine regulations where two teams in particular are objecting to the proposals. But in terms of building a car and knowing how the tyres are going to be run next year, we think it’s clear.

Q: (Bob Constanduros - Bob Costanduros & Associates) Mike Doodson asked what are the rules?
RB: The diffuser is changed to produce less downforce, the front wing is lifted up, the rear wing is moved forward and there’s one set of tyres for the whole race.
PSt: Now wait. It has not been agreed. Ross is saying five or six teams. It requires eight votes in the technical working group to get it through and that’s the problem we have time and time again.
RB: I think you’re wrong. If you look at how it’s been handled, Paul – I’m not saying I agree with the way it’s been handled, but the FIA have said this is a proposal we are prepared to accept because we think it’s a good proposal, and unless you can come up with an alternative proposal, which requires eighty percent, then this is the one by default that we are going to apply. So six teams have written to the FIA and said we are going to go along with your proposals. So by definition there can no longer be a majority for an alternative proposal. So as far as we’re concerned, it’s done.
EJ: But to be fair, we have not been notified. I haven’t been notified that six people have written to the FIA. And the other thing is that with the greatest of respect and they do a hugely important job, the TWG, the working group do not make the rules. They need to be ratified and I think Paul’s argument is valid. I am inclined to support what Ross is saying, that if you were a punter and you were having a bet, you would have a bet that what’s on the paper by Max is what’s going to be accepted. That is sure but it is not certain. It’s like what’s the point of having an engagement with a girl? You are not sure you are going to marry her are you? She’s said yes to being engaged but she hasn’t agreed to do all the rest of the stuff. (Laughter)
PSt: The trouble with all of this is that you get situations where you think things are agreed and then it’s just turned over time and time and time again, and that is the uncertainty that the small teams are suffering. We do not know what is going to happen in terms of, as I mentioned before, Mark One or Mark Two version of these groups. The original was that the diffuser was going to be radically modified and the floor was going to be radically modified, but then the next proposal was the front and the rear wing which I believe, Tony, was what your people were dead against because it trashed your chassis for next year. And that’s the kind of thing that goes on all the time. You get to a situation where one or two people make suggestions and a few more people jump on the bandwagon and say ‘that’s a great idea,’ and then you get the other side and someone says ‘well I’ve been going in a completely different direction and I’ve just wasted six months R&D.’ It just doesn’t work. This is August, guys, the middle of August. We need to know what we’re doing next year, not still be talking about it.
TP: Ross’s summary, I think, was very pragmatic and probably the way it is going to go. But having sat in some of the team principal meetings, the Byzantine nature of Formula One politics means that surprising things can happen. However, I think Ross is the probable clairvoyant here.
PSt: But that’s the whole point. We need a clairvoyant? We don’t need a clairvoyant - we need a regulation that makes rules.
TP: If the sport’s going to reform, this sort of thing needs to be tackled and in the future it just shouldn’t come up because the regulations and the methods are clear, pragmatic and sensible.

Q: (Eddie Jordan – Jordan Grand Prix) I am probably not supposed to ask questions, but I would like to ask Pat and Ross a question, and that is, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could leave here on Sunday knowing, with a recommendation from all of the teams or the vast majority of the teams which would be if you like a legitimate number of people to get the rules accepted. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to do that this weekend or is that not possible?
PSy: I think that is very possible and we have a meeting on Sunday morning which I think will ratify it. My understanding is exactly the same as Ross’s. It is what we are working on, it’s what we believe is going to happen and it’s what I think the Technical Working Group recommendations will be and Ross is quite right about the voting process. Effectively, at this stage, and I am sorry if the team principals didn’t know it, but six teams have agreed to it and, therefore, the mechanism is in place for it to happen. Unfortunately, it now has to go… the team principals will get involved and of course, then things do become uncertain and erm (laughter) it is a difficult situation. We are too damned democratic for our own good in this sport. It’s a very strange situation where the competitor sets the rules, but that’s the way Formula One is. There are a lot of vested interests and it does get very messy and it’s certainly time for reform. But our problem of today, I believe, is pretty well there. I am quite sure the technical working group will effectively ratify these proposals on Sunday and I’m sure that there will then be further argument, but strictly speaking, once that’s done, those are the rules. Now, I know that perhaps that’s perhaps an idealistic view and that there are certain team principals who have a lot of say, a lot of influence and they can turn things round but we’re doing everything we can to resolve this situation and think we’re behaving responsibly and professionally.
PSt: I just need to correct Pat on one thing there. I don’t know where you are getting this six vote thing from, but this whole process is under the Concorde Agreement and article 7.5 is very, very clear. Under what Max has put forward to the Technical Working Group, it requires 80 percent vote in favour.
RB: I don’t think it does Paul.
PSy: It is not quite like that, Paul, I don’t think.
RB: If no solution is found with the Working Group, then the proposal the FIA makes – they make three proposals which the Working Group then has to accept one of and I’m sure we’ve got one proposal and I’m sure the other proposals are going to be putting the engines in the front and having eight wheeled cars or something or other. So there will be only one sensible proposal which will, by default, become the solution, so that’s how it will work.
EJ: Pat, I’m sorry to take you up on what you said, because it seems like cat and mouse here but the words were ‘we’re pretty well there’, ‘hopefully, blah, blah, blah’ and ‘then there will be further argument because it’s the team principals, etc., etc.’ Some of those words… Honestly, I agree with each of those sentiments because we are not there. We would like to be there, we want to be there. We want it fixed. Please, you guys, and us, we all should get together and we should all be in that meeting on Sunday morning if they can’t make it on Friday, on Saturday. We should all be there and get it finished. It’s simple. It’s not difficult.
RB: I support Eddie’s comments, it is just that I have been to some team principal meetings and if we started that on Sunday morning we wouldn’t have a race on Sunday afternoon. (Laughter)

Q: (Luc Domenjoz – Le Matin) Ross, I noticed something bizarre during the last German Grand Prix. We all know that the Ferrari mechanics are very efficient and that the Ferrari engine is probably very good on fuel consumption but adding up the pit stop times of Michael I did notice that he was slower than virtually every other driver on three stop strategies and especially, he was 6.4 seconds slower than Button and 6.2 seconds slower than Alonso, stopping three times at approximately at the same time. It is an enormous amount of time. How would you explain this?
RB: I think you need to study how the times have been generated. Because the FIA time is the time from when the car enters the pit lane to the time it leaves. And I think on two occasions we had to hold the car because of traffic in the pit lane, so the car was stuck there with cars coming down the pit lane and we couldn’t release the car into the pit lane because there was traffic. So it doesn’t actually reflect the time of the proper pit stop. I think that if you look at the televised coverage and use a stopwatch from the time we started the pit stop to the time we actually finished the pit stop you will see that the time is much more sensible. We do an analysis ourselves after each race and a large part of that was because of Michael twice getting held up in the pit lane because of traffic.

Q: (Matt Bishop – F1 Racing) I was interested in the opinions of Tony, Pat and Eddie on the Fax Max campaign and Tony’s qualifying proposal. I would just like to have the views of Ross and Willy and Paul if possible?
RB: I think that what’s interesting about the whole qualifying situation is that there’s lots of really exciting ideas. Tony’s is an exciting idea, several people have come to me with an interesting idea. One is to start with all the cars, and after 15 minutes, the slowest five get taken out, and after another 15 minutes the next slowest five get taken out and it keeps going until five are left and you have then got one hour of cars running around trying to qualify. There are lots of really good ideas. I think that what is seriously lacking in our sport is a proper mechanism to assess those ideas on a proper basis to decide what is viable. Because we all have different opinions and as Tony mentioned earlier, the system we have of unanimous agreement or less than 80 per cent majority doesn’t help to develop new ideas because we all have vested interests in what we want to see. And it would seem to be that the best approach would be to try and set up a mechanism, a working group – a couple of people from the media, a couple of engineers, a couple of team principals – and everybody unanimously accept that the conclusions of the working group are what we are going to have for qualifying. And then maybe even have one race a year where we can try all the new systems to see whether it works, because the problem is we commit, and like Pat said, we commit, we have to design the cars, we get frustrated because the car we designed doesn’t suit the qualifying system, so we won’t agree with it. Maybe one race a year could be a race which is set to one side to try these experiment approaches. The Race of Champions used to be ideal – it was a non-points scoring Formula One race where it would have been an ideal environment to experiment new approaches and see if they work. I don’t really want to support or condone Tony’s proposal. I think it’s very interesting, but all we should really have is a proper mechanism to go out there and find out whether it is better than what we have now.
WR: I think overall it is quite good to think on quite a radical solution or a radical change to the qualifying, so overall I think it’s quite good that somebody brought it up and said, OK, let’s think about a completely different qualifying format. The problem I see with this proposal is it will be more costly because it will lead to qualifying cars and qualifying components again if we have short races. And I don’t know how the public would react if we have a spectacular short race on Friday and one on Saturday. I don’t know if they are still interested to watch a long race on Sunday. Maybe the interest would go down. I think that if we change the qualifying format then it has to be well thought out so that we don’t have to correct it or change it during the season, because I think that this could be even more confusing for the problem and for the spectators.
PSt: We’ve had three different qualifying formats in the last three years, we’ve almost had four. Undoubtedly, whatever happens, we owe it to the people that actually are watching this sport and not just the ones that come to the tracks but the 300-odd million that watch us across the course of a weekend, to actually get it right. One of the things that Ross said is absolutely right – while unanimity exists, we will not agree on what to do. And all we’re doing is chopping and changing. Tony’s proposal is incredibly exciting and he has my total support but it would get knocked down by somebody else. And until we get out of this existing Concorde Agreement, get out of unanimity on everything, or all but… everything that matters and get into majority or super majority voting, we’re going to have this situation prevail, however sad it is. From my own viewpoint, I thought last year’s qualifying was quite good. We didn’t have all the complaints, we didn’t have all the arguments, we had something for Fridays, it meant something. It produced a couple of interesting results. I benefited from one of them in France. But we had some interesting grids. We still saw the greatest driver in the greatest car win the championship. Nothing’s going to change that. Do you want to have a little bit of fun and go with the Tony/F1 Racing proposal? Yeah, it would be good, but you have put in the safeguards. Qualifying cars would find their way back in, for sure. As soon as we invent rules the teams with money find ways to break the rule… not break the rules, comply with the rules in a more beneficial way.
TP: I think that Ross is absolutely right, that in an ideal system, we would have working groups and a nicely constructed system. Unfortunately, pragmatically, we don’t have any of that. There is no real promoter element in the rules – make it more exciting, make it more entertaining – so I guess this going through the media and appealing to the public is a pragmatic way of just trying to improve the entertainment. I would strongly argue that if you ask people in the shopping centres or in the banks on Fridays or Saturdays which they would prefer, a mini race or a single lap qualifying or an hour running around, it would be overwhelming. I suppose, when you can’t see how to do things or things aren’t happening through the system you break out of the system to try to get something done. So I would appeal to people who would like to see the sport change a bit to Fax Max and make their opinion heard.
RB: I think the big danger is do they understand what they’re getting and do we understand what we’re going to get, because Pat’s explained that maybe there is no overtaking, maybe it is a ten-lap procession. If you said to me there is two ten lap races that we our qualifying position depends on, I would try and build a car like theirs (Renault’s) with fantastic start performance because the start would be everything and then everyone would follow every other car around. He (Symonds) is the one who should be saying that that would be a really great system because he’ll gain. We would all have to build cars like he’s built to get the start performance because the starts will become far more crucial. It’s OK saying ‘let’s get the public to vote.’ I don’t think the public are always the best judges of how this will eventually evolve into a system. I’ve heard it said, ‘let’s get rid of traction control, it will be far more interesting, the racing will be far more interesting, we’ll get more overtaking.’ Well, it is completely foundless. If we get rid of traction control, hardly anything will change. We got rid of launch control because everyone said we wanted more exciting starts. It hasn’t changed a thing. So I respect the public’s opinion but they need to understand what they’re actually voting for. It seems very simple – let’s have two ten lap races – but Formula One would evolve into a different form which would then perhaps negate the excitement of a ten lap race, so we really need to understand what step two, step three, step four is going to be.
TP: I certainly agree with Pat that the Parc Fermé has improved life for people in Formula One and we shouldn’t lose the benefits that have evolved and of course, the detail has to be worked out by the experts.

Q: (Anne Giuntini – L’Equipe) Ross, last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix was a tough one for Ferrari and since then Ferrari won everything, almost, except Monaco. So, to what extent was that race a booster for Ferrari?
RB: I think, like everyone in Formula One, we are very competitive so any loss or any poor performance is an incentive to do better and I think you see it consistently, certainly amongst the teams that have the resources, that when they doing badly they work even harder and they put even more effort into trying to resolve their situation. You’ve seen it with McLaren this year and for sure we were very disappointed with our performance in Hungary last year. I remember when I had to radio Michael and say ‘pull over because Alonso’s lapping you’. He said ‘you’re kidding aren’t you?’ It was a rare event for him! The whole year was a big incentive for us because of the nature of the people involved and Hungary was certainly a big disappointment. When you have those disappointing races they stick with you and we’ve been doing a lot of work this year with a view to making sure Hungary is more competitive this year. I think we will be more competitive. I think we have got a much better car and we’ve got much better tyres. We’ve got a new specification of tyre here which seems to be working very well. Hungary is difficult because the track evolves a lot over the weekend so even what we’re seeing today may not be a good barometer of what we’re going to see on Sunday. But I know on Friday last year we were already in trouble so at least we’re not at that stage, so it’s a bit more encouraging.

Q: (Joe Saward – F1 Grand Prix Special) Looking at the viewing figures that we have for this year, they’re actually not that bad at all. They’re actually on the same level as in previous years. Is all this talk about changing absolutely necessary or is it all about battling egos among the people who are making decisions?
PSy: I think the viewing figures are quite interesting, because I think they are up about five percent overall. What is particularly interesting is that they are up a hell of a lot in Italy and Germany – now there’s a surprise - and they are down in Finland and they are down in Holland – also what a surprise. Maybe that tells us more than what we’re talking about.
RB: I think safety is an issue, genuinely. I think we do have a safety issue and harping on again about the mechanism we have, the working group has known in reality that we would have to do something for a couple of years now and we’ve simply not been able to find a solution amongst ourselves. Most of the time we can, but on this particular issue it had become very difficult to find an ideal solution and really, this year, we had to knuckle down and find a solution and most of what’s been proposed to slow the cars down has come from the Working Group. Maybe we should have done that a little bit sooner but I think safety is a concern. The cars will still be very, very quick but I think all the track safety standards, we just reached a limit of them over a period of time and we have to reset the point, go back and start again.