Wednesday January 26th, 2000

Q: You've already run this year's car; how does it differ from last year's at this stage?

Jock Clear (Jacques Villeneuve's race engineer): I think the difference from last year is that at this stage last year, yes, we probably had a car that was reasonably quick but we had reliability problems. We had no idea what was in store for those reliability problems. The difference is we have a reliable car now and we know where we are weak in performance, and we know where that performance is going to come from, both from our side and Honda's side.

I think the biggest thing that Honda has taught us, in the short time that we've worked together, is to set realistic goals, firm lines in the sand that you achieve, and that's what we didn't achieve last year. We fell over ourselves last year trying to achieve everything too soon. Honda has come along and said 'by this race we'll do this.' Of course, we're British, and we say, 'well, if you can do it then, why can't we do it now.' And Honda say 'no, no by this race we do this?'

That's the way they work, and after a while, you see the benefits of that, that you achieve what you set out to achieve rather than fall over yourself as we did last year. Yes, we're not quick enough, but that's because the car is in the form that you see now. We know what's to come from Honda, and what's to come from the aerodynamics department. It's not that they are saying 'we'll try and find you this.' They are saying 'we will have this by Melbourne, we'll find you this by Imola' and as long as we can keep by those lines in the sand? I have no doubt that my mid-season, we will have the best engine in Formula One, it's whether we can do it justice, and I like to feel that we can.

These Honda people are massively impressive in every respect. They are focussed and their attention to detail is just awesome. All that is not being lost on us. We're recognising that. We'd like to think that some of it rubs off on us.

Q: How many Honda people are working in the factory?

Clear: I'm not sure how many exactly, because we have quite an ebb and flow from Brackley (BAR's base) to Bracknell (Honda's British base) to Japan but I think there's probably about 20 people virtually permanently at Brackley. They're working on the chassis side, brakes, differentials, all this sort of thing, giving us the kind of back-up that people like Ferrari are used to; being able to bring chassis designers in when and where they need them.

Hosaka-san (Honda's competition boss in Europe) summed it up when he said this opportunity was rare: to develop a relationship with a chassis designer, not just to supply a chassis designer, from the start. With all their expertise and all their experience, they were still going to struggle to get the likes of Williams or McLaren to let them have the kind of scope that we are prepared to let them have. But it's all to our benefit. These guys are very clever, and they have good resources, so it bodes well.

Q: So you're not worried by current performance?

Clear: No. If we came away from the test saying 'we're not very quick, I wonder why that is,' we look at our efficiency figures, we look at our power figures, we look at what's going on with the car and we say 'yup, that's about where we should be and it's not good enough.' We know what's in store for the Melbourne Grand Prix and that's not good enough either. We have set ourselves a definitive target for Melbourne and if all that comes together, we know how far behind the McLaren that's going to put us. It's too far to be fighting for pole positions and winning races. But if we continue to understand where the weaknesses are, and build on them, then I've sure we can eat into that gap. But McLaren are going to be doing the same thing as well.

But the fact that we have this Honda engine, and it's a new Honda engine, Honda are very conservative. They've not coming flying out of the box with as much horsepower as they can physically create and then going backwards. They are coming out step by step by step and these are lines in the sand: that's what we are going to do by then, and that's what we are going to do by then. That sort of development isn't going to be coming out of the Ilmor(Mercedes). The engine is older than ours. We'd like to think that the kind of development that you saw from Ilmor in '97 and '98 is what you will see from Honda this year.

Q: What about the vibrations, last year's faults?

Clear: Yes, we've done a lot of work in the design office to overcome the kind of shortcomings that last year's car had, but it would be unfair to say that we've solved all the shortcomings from BAR's side. Just putting the Honda in has taken away so much of the vibration problems that parts that would probably not have survived last year are surviving race distances now. So again, we have to take our hat off to Honda for that kind of development. We're not asking so much of lots of the parts on the car - the suspension, the rear wing, the links, that sort of thing are having a much easier life of it, which is a massive advantage.