Of course BAR-Honda had more scope for improvement than, say, Ferrari, but that's still impressive going. Being ranked as the only team to have raised their game more for 2004 than the boys from Maranello is an outstanding achievement.

Crucial to the success of the modern Grand Prix car is getting its weight down as low and as far forward as possible. The need for lowness is obvious; a low center of gravity reduces lateral weight transfer in corners and thus allows all its tyres to contribute more grip. Advantages are strong in braking as well. Moving the weight forward is beneficial because it allows the front tyres to work harder, taking better advantage of the tyre sizes that the rules allow. It relieves the rear tyres so they can deal better with putting the power down.

To be able to put weight where they want it, Formula One designers need the car's basic structure to be as light as possible without sacrificing strength, stiffness and crash survivability. That's where carbon-fiber composites come in. When he was with Arrows, Gary "Doc" Savage pioneered the use of carbon-fiber for suspension members. The technique has since swept the pitlane. Now at Brackley he's engineering new applications for carbon-fiber parts made with a new "super-toughened" epoxy resin, 2035, developed expressly for motor-sports use in cooperation with BAR.

One example is the roll hoop, a part which has to pass an FIA impact test. The new composite allows this to be 15 percent lighter for 2004, reducing weight at the highest point in the car. It also achieved a weight saving of 28 percent in the rear impact structure, the part that protrudes from the back of the gearbox to carry the wing and to absorb rearward impact energy in a crash.

Most impressively, Savage and his team have been able to give Geoff Willis a carbon-fiber transaxle housing for 2004. Lightning the gearbox housing is a Holy Grail for Formula One engineers because it sheds weight low in the chassis and at the rear, where excess mass can fight the driver's efforts to keep the rear wheels behind the front ones. Various teams, including Arrows and Stewart, tried it, but not until 2004 has a carbon-fiber housing been mastered by BAR-Honda. With its bonded-in titanium inserts the new housing carries all the gears plus crucial attachment points for rear-suspension members.

Understandably, BAR are mum about the new housing's specific weight loss, but it proved its merit decisively during testing at Barcelona last November. In the 2003 car's fifth lap with the new transaxle it was clocked below that year's pole position time. "It made it into a rocket ship," said Savage.

The new plastic box is also amazingly tough. "Its fatigue life is virtually infinite," its creator says. As a result the team can get through the 2004 season with half as many housings as it needed last year. Astonishingly, as well, with the aid of a mobile curing oven the housings can be repaired in the field! "At Jerez," Savage said, "a gear went and holed the housing at two o'clock in the afternoon. By six o'clock it was repaired and cured and we ran 105 laps with it the next day."

Thanks to measures like this the lightest cars in 2004 can carry as much as 80 kilograms, 176 pounds, of tungsten ballast ultra-close to the road and well forward in the chassis. You'll even find it in parts of the front wing. Talk around the paddock is that the highly touted twin-keel front-suspension layout is disadvantageous because it doesn't allow enough tungsten to be positioned well forward. That's why Williams is expected to go back to a central-keel chassis in 2005.