Stewart Backs Jaguar Overhaul Plans

Jaguar non-executive chairman Jackie Stewart has said he expects team principal Niki Lauda to bring in fresh faces to the team, following their disastrous start to the 2002 season.

Speaking to reporters in the Sepang paddock on Saturday, three-time World Champion Stewart said continual management changes have hurt Jaguar, but insisted Lauda is already preparing to get the right men in place to drive the struggling outfit forward.

"Niki Lauda is extremely mature about it and he is putting into action plans to avoid this ever happening again," said Stewart. "It has got to be fixed and I think Niki will be going out for a new team of people to bring the quality up.

"Hopefully some of them will be young, some of them will be mainly untried, but we have to recognise it has got to be a lot different to how it is currently."

The team will decide at a test at Barcelona next week whether to replace their new under-performing R3 car with last year's R2 model for the forthcoming Brazilian Grand Prix.

And Stewart admitted the pace of the R3 has left Jaguar staff at their Milton Keynes base in low spirits despite driver Eddie Irvine's fortunate points-scoring finish in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

"The mechanics, the team, the whole spirit is not good," said Stewart. "And I don't think it is going to be fixed in a matter of weeks.

"You can't have continual changes of management, the culture changes, the procedures, the systems, the way of doing business changes. The staff don't like that. They want a clear picture of where to go.

"Disruption can leak all the way through to the design office. When crucial design leaders don't work together any longer or they are not there any more, then everybody is left picking up the pieces."