This week's Grapevine brings you information fresh from the paddock on: Jaguar Working to Justify F1 A Level Playing Field?

Jaguar Working to Justify F1

Following a tough year in their core business, Ford are taking a close look at their divisions, with a view to bolstering up the balance sheet. Whether by cutting budgets, or selling assets, protecting the bottom line is important if the shareholders' interest is to be maintained.

For Ford's F1 outfit, it means that despite being a tremendous marketing asset for the company, the pressure is on to make the group independent and self-funded. Whilst that is not going to happen in the short term, the budget is to come under scrutiny, with a view to adjusting it according to the current marketing potential of the team - which is impacted by performance.

When Jaguar first arrived on the scene, the team immediately failed to live up to the standards set by Stewart Grand Prix - but their impact on sales was clear and positive from the outset. The interest the team generated sold enough extra Jaguars that the whole investment into the first year was justified - despite the poor results. However, as the seasons wore on, the weight of negative publicity from sudden sackings and failure to deliver results has blunted the marketing message, and it is hard to justify the budget.

Looking at 2004, Mark Webber plays a key role in the political strategy of the team. The driver was responsible for putting the car into the top six in qualifying five times in '03, something Eddie Irvine managed only four times in the three years he drove for them. It is this evidence that the performance of the cars is fundamentally solid that provides the basis of an argument that the team are on the right track in terms of design, whilst they clearly have a driver who can make the most of what is on offer. Without breaking the bank.

To make further progress, there are two aspects that the team need to consider. Obviously, it is imperative to identify why this car was not capable of sustaining performance over a race distance in order to improve the design of the new car; however, it is also vital to bolster the in-season development, as the gap to the front runners was not improving through 2003. This is going to require some considerable funding, beyond the current sponsorship and customer engine income.

Looking for new sponsorship is also a route forward, but fraught with problems of its own. For example, Red Bull are reputedly interested in buying Jacques Villeneuve a drive with the team in order for the formula to maintain a North American presence. Whilst the driver is clearly talented, it would mean that most of the Red Bull budget would be lost to paying his very serious salary.

For some time, it has been a good source of income for Ford to sell customer engines; however, the important information about how to integrate the engine effectively, or get the most from the drive-train, is where the real money lies, so it is little doubt that Jaguar really want to sell the designs for sections of their car. Better still, they would like to manufacture the components, too, so they can make more cash from the spares.

Of course, getting someone to buy these components or their design is still subject to costs - the teams that most want it, typically, have the least money. Those who could have their own, effective, development programs, so it would be little more than giving away secrets. Arguably, there is not a tremendous amount to be made from selling the cars.

Little surprise, then, that Ford believes Jaguar should be relieving the strain on their budget, by raising the price for their customer engines!

A Level Playing Field?

When the teams got together to discuss the future shape of the Formula One weekend, they came up with a solution that should suit the big players down to the ground.

For spectators, the revised weekend is going to look pretty familiar. Two free sessions on Friday, with two more plus a qualifying session on Saturday is basically a return to the previous format, though qualifying is an amalgamation of this year's Friday and Saturday sessions.

Looking at what the teams gain, it is clear that the big players have seen the benefits that the "Heathrow Agreement" was bringing to the teams that signed up for Friday testing, and have moved to neuter the threat. Renault's impressive evolution over the course of the season, despite being limited to a couple of hours on the Friday morning of Grand Prix, has been a clear indicator of the benefits of extra set-up time. Being able to run an extra driver, adding 50 percent more input to dialling in the cars, helps ensure that the optimum balance for any circuit is discovered. By regularly succeeding in achieving the best balance, the team were able to choose the softer Option tyre on numerous occasions when their main rivals had to run with the Prime, offering gains of up to a second over a lap.

Looking back over the course of the season, both McLaren and Williams have run the numbers, and each has seen at least three events where being able to run the Option tyre should have made a real difference in scoring points: largely as a side-effect of the additional fuel they could have run for the same qualifying position, rather than the difference to race pace. Of course, they would have appreciated the opportunity for an extra six hours of track time at the start of the weekend, but the cost - giving up testing between events - would have been a catastrophic impact on the development programs they were running.

Ferrari, too, have struggled to make the most of their new car. The F2003-GA is significantly quicker than its predecessor, and is arguably the best car the team have ever produced, but to date Ferrari has failed to extract the absolute maximum from it at events. Significantly, having run the F2002 for a year, dialling it in to every circuit under the old system, it was a well-known commodity. The design of the F2003-GA was fixed long before the season's format was revised. This partially explains why it was designed with greater potential, but the trade-off was making it more sensitive to set-up. As the season progressed Ferrari worked hard with Bridgestone to develop their understanding of the package; this work underpinned their public support of the tyre manufacturer when it was clearly off the pace being set by Michelin. Even when the tyres were being delivered according to Ferrari's requirements, they were not making the best of them.

Clearly, increasing free-practice time over racing weekends will benefit all the teams when it comes to setting up their cars; they will all be running closer to their potential limits by the time it comes to qualifying and racing. Certainly, ensuring all the teams get the same track time will significantly reduce the odds of a lesser team outperforming their more illustrious peers. Give or take driver errors, the cars are expected to better reflect their design limits.

The revised qualifying format is also expected to offer the biggest advantage to the fastest packages. With the first part of qualifying running in the previous race order, the top performers should be running last in the second part of the session; this gives them more time to adjust the car between runs, or otherwise react to what everyone else does. How and when fuel loads are picked and locked off is going to be vital, but the system continues to offer the biggest advantages to the cars that are performing the best!

The tactical element remains - picking the right fuel loads will be important, and the weather can still throw surprises into the qualifying mix. But there is little doubt that the net effect of these changes will be to extend the gap between the front and the back of the grid.