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Geoff Willis Q&A

BAR has clearly made some progress over the winter, thanks in part to Honda's focus on a single team this year. Jenson Button and Jacques Villeneuve have been enjoying a little civil war off the track, but on it there have been signs of increased speed. So far the only reward has been a seventh place for the Briton in Malaysia, after he lost two places in the last lap. But at least he was well inside the top six for much of the race. Adam Cooper spoke to technical director Geoff Willis about progress



"Overall the whole weekend went reasonably well in terms of reliability. Clearly we struggled a little bit for consistency in the high temperature. We certainly made the right call on the two-stop strategy, although it was very frustrating to have only one car start the race, but excellent to have one car finish in the points. Jenson had a fairly good battle trying to hold Trulli and Michael behind, which unfortunately we didn't see on the TV!"



"We had an electrical dropout where it reset the chassis controller and damaged the gearbox. He couldn't select a gear, possibly because of mechanical damage in the 'box. There was no way we were going to move from that. We could start the engine again, but we couldn't engage gear."



"It was too late to go to the T-car because he jumped out of it after the green light [for the formation lap], although we certainly would have liked to use it, even starting from the pitlane. Information we get from one driver is going to help the other in terms of the balance of the car, and of course you can pull him in early and look at the tyres."



"Yes, a little bit. The trouble with these first three flyaways is they are all very hot, and at the moment the two tyres seem to be behaving quite differently. We've just got to work a bit harder. Certainly we need to be faster, although I think we've got a reasonable amount of speed."



"I think we'll be looking forward to getting back to slightly cooler conditions in Europe. But it's a good start. We've sorted the reliability of the car out, despite Jacques's problem, and when you've got a good stable platform, with very few mechanical problems, then you can work on speed."



"Certainly I'd be very keen to see the cars all pumped out in parc ferme after the race. I certainly wouldn't accuse anybody of doing it, but there are a couple of possibilities of using fuel as ballast, which is not a possibility we'd want to leave open."



"I believe that a number of the team managers have been talking to each other about it."

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