ROSS BRAWN Interview April 11, 2003, Honda To Focus On 2009

(from autosport)


Q. There have been some comments suggesting that Honda's senior management have given you two years to win. Is that correct?

Ross Brawn: We have actually not talked about it! I think the important thing is that we make good progress each year. I don't know if you can say when we will be in a position to win the world championship, because so much depends on other people.

If someone does an amazing job then it takes longer to achieve what you want to achieve. If you have a year where some people do a very poor job, then you might achieve that sooner.

So to me it is very difficult to say. As I said, the important thing is that we make progress each year, and that we take the references of the previous year and do better each season.

Q. It seems in the first three races there has been steady progress at each event. Do you see it that way?

RB: There were a few small things on the car in Bahrain, but we are setting the car up a little better and the drivers understand it a little bit more. I think the team are getting a little more confident and working nicely. We are still hanging on by our finger nails, but it is nice to have been in Q3 - as it's something I hadn't thought about before!

It is something you tend to take for granted at one end of the grid, which suddenly becomes a reward in itself if you can achieve it from where we have come from.

Q. Are the changes and the rate of progress you have seen at the team happening faster than or as fast as you expected?

RB: I know how difficult it is. So, on the one hand you don't set a rate of progress because it is very difficult, but as long as you are seeing progress, and progress pro rata your opposition, then that's fine. There is a rate of progress that means you don't actually go forward, you just hold your position, so we need more than that - we need a rate of progress that takes us forward.

Q. How are you dividing responsibilities between yourself and Nick Fry?

RB: We both do what we like doing! Nick will profess that he doesn't have a strong technical background. His background is commerce, his background is helping run the company - and those are areas that don't excite me so much. So it is a perfect balance. We came to a very easy understand as to who would be doing what. It is working well.

Q. Do you think it's helped you make more of an impact in a short time frame?

RB: That's true. The fact that I can rely on Nick to take care of that side of the business is important for me. I have got a lot of things I want to be involved in on the technical and racing side, and you could argue that anything that I am doing that is away from that is a distraction. And quite frankly, stuff that I am probably not very good at.

Q. There is an update coming for the Spanish Grand Prix. How big a step will that be?

RB: It is not the magnitude of what we did between the launch and Melbourne, but it is somewhere in-between and it is quite a good step. It is fairly traditional for all the teams to make a step for the first European race, so we have got to take that into consideration.

But I am very pleased with the way that things are developing in that area. The plan is probably to do one more update for the middle of the season, and then I think we will be focusing that resource totally on 2009. The 2009 programme has started already but as each month goes by, we move more and more resource onto it. And the mid-season update, I guess the aero work will finish late May, early June, and then the focus will be on next year.

Q. Will the step for Barcelona be more than a team would normally make at that race?

RB: I think it probably is, yes. We have got a lot of new people in the team, a lot of fresh ideas. So I think it is potentially a bigger step than I would have experienced at other teams.

Q. Are the same team of people designing next year's car that designed the last two years'?

RB: Mechanically, yes. But it is a new group on the aero side. Loic Bigois joined from Williams last year, and a couple of other people joined from other teams. So the aero group is a restructured group. I would have to say that 95 percent of people are still the same, but perhaps a slightly different direction given to them by their management.

Q. Do you have the right people in the right place now?

RB: Yes, we are getting there. It is a loop, in the sense that you fix the most important problems to begin with. And then you go around and come back again and start to refine those solutions. I think with the aero group, it was very important to make sure that was functioning very well, and I am quite pleased with that. There are some developments in the rest of the team now to strengthen some of the areas that we need to.

Q. As the weeks and the months roll past and you see the effect of your changes, do you think it conceivable you could build a championship contender for 2009?

RB: I don't think so, to be frank. There are a lot of things that the top teams are doing because they have the structure to do those things. They have the structure to understand what needs to be done.

When you take a new set of regulations and a new challenge, you have all the tools in place to understand what you need to do and what you need to create.

We have got completely different tyres next year, and we have got an excellent tyre group - but how well we will be able to predict what sort of car we need for the tyres is a difficult challenge. And the top teams are top teams for a reason. So there are things like that we have to take into account.


Q. With the timetable for next year, do you think there is a chance of teams running their 2009 cars this year?

RB: I think it depends what they want to achieve with it. There are reasons for running early, or running late, and reasons for running an interim car that is towards the regulations. This year, we had a car running and then had a fairly major update before Melbourne. That is quite a possible scenario.

Q. Have you settled on the type of KERS system you will be running next year?

RB: Not completely, no. We will be running some prototypes this year, and some of the technology we want to use won't be available until later in the year. But by the summer we will be running some prototype systems.

Q. You have said earlier this year that you felt it important you didn't dive in and get involved in strategy and pit wall decisions yourself - that it was better the team learned for themselves. Where are we up to in that process?

RB: It is up and down a bit to be honest. There are occasions when I find myself getting drawn in, because I would really like to see some things done a certain way. And there are other occasions when it is nice to see how the team develops.

If I get involved in those things all the time then it won't develop how I want to, so I watch the situation develop, spend time with people afterwards and work out if we could have done things better.