BAR speed secrets revealed

It is a remarkable turn-around for a team that, only recently, was criticised for wasting money on an over-valued driver (Jacques Villeneuve) and for an engine manufacturer accused of producing units that were over-weight, under-powered and unreliable. At Imola, however, BMW Williams driver Juan Pablo Montoya said that it was a close call between the Ferrari and Honda as to what is now the most powerful engine on the grid.

Commenting on the reasons behind his team's quantum leap forward, BAR Honda technical director Geoff Willis said: "It's really a bit of everything. Every test we go to we are learning more about the car and, particularly, about the Michelin tyres. We took another engine upgrade to Imola, with a step-up in power, particularly top-end, and there was another aero step and some more weight reduction in the car. We did a suspension geometry change based on the recommendation of the Michelin engineers and what we learned from data analysis. But there was no one big thing, just a logical engineering process."

BAR, in fact, had had to remove its 'shark fin' wing elements as a result of a rule clarification made by the FIA. This had not come, as reported elsewhere in the media, from an objection by Ferrari, but rather from a clarification sought on a separate issue by Jaguar's Ian Pocock in a recent meeting of the F1 technical working group.

"We did end up grinding a few bits off the car," Willis smiled, "but, if anything, it probably helped us a tiny bit. We rushed back into the wind tunnel, did a few more tests and it certainly didn't hurt us."