Recently I was lucky enough to be able to visit the headquarters of Pacific Grand Prix in Thetford, England. I had spoken and emailed the commercial manager, Mark Gallagher, on several occasions and he was happy to entertain me. One thing that struck me was the honesty of Mark in answering my questions and telling me what was going on at Pacific.
In this issue are the answers to most of the questions I asked Mark. Next issue (or the one after that) I will have show some photo's of the site and a bit of a description of what I saw. When reading, remember that I visited 2 days after Spa so any new announcements may have changed things.
To start off with, how is the 1995 season going, in the eyes of Pacific itself?
We are quite happy with the progress that we are making this season. One thing that has to be pointed out is that we have the smallest cash budget in F1. Forti has a bigger cash budget than Jordan, hence the reason that Forti seem to have improved their performance so much. As an example, recently Forti bought the semi-automatic gearbox from Minardi so that they could use them in their cars this season. Having paid $500,000 for them they discovered that they could not get them to work straight off so they decided not to use them. The $500,000 that they spent could have been used on testing, but as they have a lot of cash they do not need to worry.
To answer your question, look at some of the other teams that were supposedly on the up this year. Arrows.. 1 point, Tyrrell.. 0 points! These are both teams with top engines and in the case of Tyrrell a big name sponsor. After the season they had last year they must be really worried about their form. So we are not too worried about our position due to the fact that we are still new and we think that we're doing a great job on the budget we've got. Take the Belgian GP as an example; in qualifying we run around the pace of the Forti's but in the race we are about 2 seconds a lap faster than they are and this puts us up with Minardi in terms of pace.
How is the financial situation at the moment?
Well, obviously it could be a lot better but we're pretty confident that we'll be here next year (* I've seen sketches of the new car and they HAVE finished designing it *). We need to run a tight ship but there are a few things on the horizon I'm not prepared to discuss at the moment which could see us moving up compared to our rivals.
What about the injunction that Heini Mader (1994 engine supplier) took out before Spa?
This is one thing that has really annoyed me over the past week. On Friday, several of the UK broadsheets and tabloids wrote that we were in court because we hadn't paid a bill of $100,000 to Heini Mader. This is true BUT we have chosen not to pay the bill.
What happened is that in 1994 we had more engines let go on us than any other team (possibly excluding McLaren-Peugeot??). We asked Mader to explain this and he said it was a problem unrelated to the engine building done by them. We have since discovered that Mader used some second hand parts in our engines and we refused to pay for a number of the rebuilds caused by the blow-ups that they said we should (* According to Autosport, Keith Wiggins, the team owner, signed an agreement to pay in Adelaide last season before Mader allowed Pacific to race *). In addition to this we have recently taken out a high-court injunction to enable us to legally refuse payment. However, in Belgium the courts do not ask why a debt has not been paid, instead they allow the creditor appropriate authority to recover payment (this is the only country like this in Europe). If you look back, there are always legal proceedings going on at the Belgian GP and this time we were involved.
The problem with the press is that they seldom bother to get both sides of the story and in a case like ours the bad guy is the one owing the money, i.e. Pacific Grand Prix.
With reference to the previous question, how much do F1 teams in general follow the press (both specialist and normal) regarding what is written about them?
As you can see we get most of the daily papers from the UK, a lot of the specialist publications and any big articles from the foreign press. Obviously with the number of countries in the world it would be impossible to read everything, but in general the press in Europe covers pretty much everything likely to be said.
We are actually getting a lot of interest from the Italian press at them moment as we are the only team likely to be running 2 Italian drivers at their home GP.
What about pay drivers, why do teams use them?
Speaking personally I think that the term 'pay-driver' is a misnomer. The term was coined by the motorsports press in the late 1970's and early 1980's and is a bit out of date now. The idea that a driver comes to a small team with a fist full of cash and gives us it to drive a car is the image that most people have, but it's not quite like that.
If you look at some of the other teams and drivers that nobody looks at like that:
With money being tight, do you manage to develop the car
Development is very slow but we do manage to keep things moving, albeit at a slow pace. There are several aerodynamic changes coming up (* POINTS AT WIND TUNNEL MODEL *) and a few good things being redeveloped.
Autosport mentioned a change a few races ago as being a sign of the times, what was that about?
Wing mirrors, or rather we removed them. The rules state that you have to have some sort of rear view apparatus and for years designers have had to do the best they can with them. However, we changed the idea slightly (* he did tell me but I'm not sure if it's common knowledge *) and got a lot of downforce back. Unfortunately the new method wasn't as good as it could have been and Bertrand Gachot asked for the old system back. The idea is not dead and we have gone back to the manufacturer with new specifications and are quite hopeful for the future.
How do you view refueling? Did you vote for a ban?
This issue was discussed by the teams at Spa and once again the refueling ban was vetoed by Ferrari. Our main objection is the unnecessary risk to our pit crew. The drivers are well paid to risk their necks in a GP but the mechanics are poorly paid by comparison and risk serious injury regularly at each GP.
Having said all that it looks like Ferrari will have a v10 by 1996 so their objection will be removed and we can return to the days of tyre-stops and drivers considering fuel consumption.
The PRO2 has the smallest fuel tank in any F1 car this season, if refueling was banned for 96 would this cause serious problems with respect to next season's car? In addition, how much of the PRO3 is an evolution of the PRO2?
To start off with, we are assured that refueling will remain until the end of 1996 so there's no problem this year. To answer the second part I have to say that the car is basically a new car. The PRO3 will have a high nose, as well as including all the new technical regulations (higher cockpit sides among other things) so to say that the PRO2 and PRO3 are of the same lineage is stretching it a bit. Look at it this way, you wouldn't say that the drop nose Ligier-Renault of 1994 and the high-nose Ligier-Mugen are logical progression so I think that you can safely say that the new car is effectively a clean-sheet. (* Does this mean they have a new engine for 1996? *)
What are your opinions about the internet/web and what is your involvement?
The internet is obviously has great potential and we already have access to it via CompuServe. We are aware that the Mild Seven teams (Benetton and Tyrrell) have pages on the WWW and McLaren also has it's own but I'm not sure how much use a team page will be. What we'd like to see would be a FOCA or FIA controlled page that encompassed all of the teams, but having said this we are about to get our own pages.
Any details
Hewlett Packard is one of our sponsors and they suggested doing a Web page from their site. It should be up and running within two races and you can expect to see the URL on the side of the car around the same time. By doing this we are the first team to openly advertise their web site on anything other than the internet itself.
A final question for Bill..., how exactly do the teams get allocated their pitlane positions? He's been to a few GP's and as far as he can see, in a single year, things move around a bit.
Usually it depends on the position that the team finished in the previous years championship, so this season we are in between Forti (who are at the end) and Monarda. The best team are invariably at the front of the lane and the newest/lowest placing team at the end. The only time this changes is if a specific situation occurs: