Illien says V8 engines have increased costs

The sport's ruling body, the FIA, has introduced rules to force teams to use V8 units in the hope of reducing performance and costs from 2006.

But Illien believes the introduction of new rules has done the opposite, as teams have been forced to spend a lot of money to make sure the new V8 engines are reliable.

"In theory, with the regulations forcing to use the same engine for two race weekends, it looked possible to cut costs," Illien told Autosprint.

"Quite the opposite, there has been really little money saved, since we still had to build some one hundred engines per season, especially to carry out testing. An engine then gets serviced.

"2,400cc engines are the most expensive way to reduce power in F1. With these V8s there will be no savings, and in fact with the new development programmes we can expect very high costs. At the beginning, technical problems won't be lacking, so it will be necessary to have many engines at one's disposal.

"Only after this critical period it will be possible to find some sort of stability. If you wanted to have savings, it would have been enough to limit the bore and the maximum revs on the old V10s."