FIA Friday press conference - Belgium

Reproduced with kind permission of the FIA

Team principals: Ross Brawn (Honda), Stefano Domenicali (Ferrari), John Howett (Toyota), Martin Whitmarsh (McLaren).

Q: John, your thoughts on Timo Glock's future with Toyota.
JH: We have a multi-year contract with him and we are very happy. He is progressing well, he is quick and getting more and more consistent. There is absolutely no hesitation that he will be with us next year and hopefully he will progress further and stay with us for more years. At the moment he has a very secure and bright future with us.

Q: Ross, the Alonso situation with Honda?
RB: Nothing to report.

Q: No further progress?
RB: No.

Q: When would you expect progress?
RB: I think when Fernando decides where he wants to go.

Q: So it is down to him now?
RB: Yes.

Q: In some ways that, though that was Kimi's problem. But also the release of Felipe. Is there anything you are going to change?
SD: I don't think so. To be honest, as I said after the race, in our view we respect the FIA decision but it was not an unsafe release of the car because there was plenty of space. It was a very small entry. You can see in the past much, much worse situations but this is part of the racing. With regards to Kimi's situation, unfortunately these things happen and this is a key point. Any time there is a pit stop it shows how easy both mechanics and drivers can make mistakes because the tension is very high and you are fighting. This is really a very tense moment for everyone.

QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR

Q: (Thomas Richtr - TV Nova) Stefano, it seems that Felipe and Kimi are fighting each other. Is this no longer good for Ferrari's prospects to challenge Lewis Hamilton at the front. Would you agree?
SD: No, of course not. I think it is better to have two strong cars rather than one. For sure we will have maybe to take a decision as we did for example last year at a certain moment of the season in order to make sure that what you said is not happening. But at the moment I don't think so. If you look at all the races that we have done there was no situation where one of our drivers took points off the other, not at all.

Q: (Dan Knutson - National Speed Sport News) This is for all four of you: are you completely confident that one or more of your competitors is not in any way gaining engine horsepower by bending the engine freeze rules?

SD: The only thing I can say is that we trust the fact that the FIA, as you know, has a sample of the engine that they can check every time they want, so in that respect there is this kind of comparison that you can do every time. That's the situation. Even if the nature of this sport is to try to work on the area that you can work on and implement, that's part of the things that everyone is doing, but that's part of what we can do. More than that, honestly, I don't think so because it would be very detrimental for the team if they are doing something or cheating in this area because it would be a disaster for anyone who did that. So I'm positive on that.

MW: The engines are homologated as you know. There is some scope where there are reliability and costs factors but that's in a very public way. I don't sense within the sport at the moment a lot of concern about this issue. Inevitably, when you have some stability in this area, there is speculation as to who has got the best engine and who's got the worst engine and therefore some people can grow concerned about that. I think there was a period in which the engine manufacturers were allowed to tune their engines legitimately and I think some of the manufacturers applied more effort in that final very legitimate development phase than others, but that's just speculation. I'm sure there is a spread across the engines. I don't think that it's huge and significant but as to the process, then I believe at the moment, by comparison to the various suspicions and concerns that we've had in the sport in the past, I think we're in a fairly healthy situation, and those areas where the engine manufacturer has, legitimately, within the homologated engine phase, asked for a cost-down or reliability reasons, then the FIA has circulated that to the other manufacturers. If they were not comfortable, they were at liberty to challenge it at that time.

Q: And there haven't been challenges?

MW: I don't think there has. I think everyone appreciates that increasingly there is pressure and it's in the interests of our sport potentially to consider more than two race engines, and therefore if the engine manufacturers can look at where they have cracks and failures now and perhaps engineer those out, making the engines more robust, then it will potentially ease the way. If the sport chooses to go to more than two races with each engine, then that would be a healthy thing.

RB: I think the process which is in place is pretty robust. I don't suspect there has been too much going on. There is still an open point on 'do you want to fix a reliability problem because you've changed something else?' Let's say you run a different fuel and you start to have piston problems, do you apply for a piston modification? What's the situation? That's a little bit grey but I think the FIA are aware of that and the teams are aware of that and they try to seek further clarification if they feel a modification might be linked to a performance gain from another area. Whilst we froze the engines, we didn't freeze the oil, we didn't freeze the fuel, we didn't freeze a lot of the other peripherals around the engine. But I think the process is pretty robust, I don't think there's any bending going on. I think it's a competitive environment and we're in it because we're competitive individuals. The only thing that's a little bit difficult - as Martin touched on, a lot of it may be speculation - is that we freeze a design or we homologate a design or we standardise a design, it's because we see perhaps there's very little performance differential between the teams and we can afford to freeze it. It would be unfair to freeze something where you then build in a performance advantage for the teams that may have an advantage for the period that it's frozen and I think that's where this speculation has started from because some teams perceive that other teams have more power and there's nothing that we can do about it. And of course it's all speculation, but that's the nature of what we're involved in. It could be good for there to be considered a way of confirming the situation, so that we can put that all to one side and get on with the rest of the things but I think that when the engines were frozen, at that stage there was a perception that everyone was at a pretty similar level. I didn't hear any disquiet when that process was suggested. There is some disquiet now, as you know, so either things changed between when it was decided to freeze them and they were actually frozen, or people are just uncomfortable now because they are not competitive enough. I think it's always delicate if you freeze something where there's a potential to be performance differences between the teams. And we've really moved the engine out of the equation now, there's no development going on with the engine. It's a bracket between the chassis and the gearbox now. We can't do anything with it. But of course if one team does have an advantage there's nothing you can do about it. It's possibly just a concern for further technical restrictions in the future because the more we restrict the chassis, those teams that feel that they may be disadvantaged in the engine department will be more reluctant to make changes to other areas of the car, which would then give them less scope to redress the balance. If we had completely standard cars, different engines, then the engine would be the only variable. So we've got to make sure we leave enough left in the car that we don't just form up a grid based on the engine performance.

JH: I will try to be quick: in fairness I would say we have raised some concerns, I wouldn't say we've challenged it and we feel they have been handled very professionally by the FIA, so we don't have concern. And two other aspects is most of the engine power evolution that's been coming over the last five or six years is by extending engine rpm, so from a mechanical perspective, now with frozen rpm, it's extremely hard to believe the figures that one hears quoted for the evolution, purely from mechanical changes with a frozen engine rpm. And secondly, I think one has to respect the fact that an engine is a total package, so yes, if you get more power, you have more heat rejection, you probably need more fuel to drag around, so the engine now is somewhere an integral part of many other factors. So I believe within the frozen environment, even if people are changing in a minor way, I don't honestly believe the figures and the impact that's been quoted are in fact correct.