Despite undergoing a major reshuffle before the start of the new season, the Jaguar team have failed to show a significant improvement in the first two races of the year, and the three Cosworth-powered teams, along with Toyota, are the only ones yet to score a point. Karl Ludvigsen looks at the situation of the Ford-owned squad and their unusual managerial structure

Some may think it a bit early in the season to start Jaguar-bashing, but the green cats offer such an attractive target that it's hard to resist. Furthermore, some useful lessons can be drawn from the relative performances in Malaysia of two teams backed by big auto producers, Renault and Jaguar.

First, however, a word about Cosworth. I was tough on Cosworth last year, though late that season some folks started saying that the best Cosworths were pretty good. Certainly the people at Jaguar weren't blaming the engine, which is always a convenient scapegoat when things are going badly. But what can we learn from Malaysia?

I know these new starting grids are supposed to be unrepresentative, but what are we to think of a grid that has Cosworth-powered cars in 14th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 19th, and 20th places? There aren't any more places! The three teams involved - Jaguar, Jordan and Minardi - have only one thing in common: engines from Northampton. And then (I'm sorry to have to mention it) there was the race.

Cosworth-powered cars figured exactly nowhere in the events at Sepang. One finished 10th (Ralph Firman's Jordan) and the other 14th and last (Jos Verstappen's Minardi). Not a great weekend for Cosworth and its owner Ford. Through the first two races of the year, even with the new expanded points system no Cosworth-powered car has scored points. This has to be viewed as catastrophic.

As for Jaguar, a Cosworth problem - loss of engine oil - was directly responsible for Mark Webber's retirement. After a front wing replacement, Antonio Pizzonia went back into the fray, only to spin off on lap 43. Though he and his team blamed this on "a brake problem," it's all too evident that the pundits of the sport have little regard for the Brazilian's capabilities. Their assumption was that his retirement was self-inflicted. We have to look to the next race in Brazil - his home event - to see whether Jaguar goofed in engaging Pizzonia and showing the door to Pedro de la Rosa. The latter has certainly made folks sit up and pay attention with his excellent testing times for McLaren-Mercedes.

In stark contrast with Jaguar, Renault had a sensational race in Malaysia. If domination of the front row in qualifying weren't enough, the cheeky Frenchmen with their Tonka-toy-colored racer put a Spaniard on the podium for the first time since Fon de Portago's second place at Silverstone in 1956. With Jarno Trulli finishing fifth a lap behind, it was an outstanding result for the Renault team.

Both their pilots are in the big tie for third place among the drivers and they're now ranked equal second on constructors points with Ferrari! What a great start to their season! And Renault says there's still much more to come in the way of power from its 106-degree V10. That promises well for the rest of the year, even against newer chassis from McLaren and Ferrari. The Renault chassis is obviously very good already.

At least one lesson can be drawn from the sharp contrast in performance between these two outfits. Jaguar's new team structure is an utter shambles. When he was asked at Malaysia where he sat in the organization in his new job as the team's sporting director, John Hogan answered as follows: "A guy called Tony Purnell is actually the CEO. A guy called Dave Pitchforth under Tony Purnell is actually the managing director of the team. Tony Purnell reports to Richard Parry-Jones who is the chief technologist of the Ford Motor Company. I report to all of them."

Does that make any sense to you? It doesn't to me. Where does the buck stop in a structure like that? And Jaguar also has somebody named Mark Gillan, who is "head of vehicle performance," whatever that means. Gillan had to take the heat from the press with his statement about Jaguar's miserable showing at Sepang. None of the abovementioned worthies was willing to step forward with a mea culpa.

So how does John Hogan see his new job? "In overall terms," he told the press at Malaysia, "it's to run and look after the general business side of the company. It's basically to talk and think about where we should go as a team, where we should go and how we should get there." Sounds to me suspiciously like corporate double-talk in a team that already has quite enough of that, thank you.

I wish John Hogan the best, needless to say. But after seeing where he fits in the structure I understand why the people who were approached previously wanted nothing to do with the job. John took it because he needed a place to go during the day; his wife wanted him out of the house! He may find the latter the lesser of two evils in a team that already has too many chiefs.

In sharp contrast to the situation at Jaguar, what has Renault done? It's placed Flavio Briatore in complete command of all its Formula One operations, including the engine plant at Viry-Chatillon. "I had a lot of spare time," joked Briatore, "and now I'm a bit more busy." This is not only a tribute to his employer's assessment of Flavio's skills but also a clear sign that somebody at Renault (Patrick Faure perhaps?) realizes that a racing team doesn't thrive on confusion. "Now I believe I own my destiny," said Briatore, "and it's much better. I only have one boss and I think it was the right decision." Briatore clearly has both the responsibility and the authority. The buck stops with him.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, the demanding genius who pushed through America's nuclear-submarine program against the opposition of his own navy, understood the need to give one person both the authority and the responsibility. "If you want to have real responsibility," he told a congressional committee, "you must make a competent man responsible for the entire project and not let him say, 'Well, I'm here two years and if something goes wrong it was the fault of my predecessor.' I can never say that…. If anything goes wrong, I'm responsible."

Ford's culture is all too prone to the 'if something goes wrong it was the fault of my predecessor' syndrome. It could be encouraging such a culture to flourish at Jaguar Racing with its frequent staff changes and "better ideas". Every indication this time is that it's Renault that has the "better idea".