Honda-powered teams aim for big game

That was the message - coupled with some pre-season fighting talk - both sent out at a press conference in Tokyo yesterday (Monday) as Honda launched its F1 attack just six days before the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

"Obviously for BAR our biggest direct competitor is Jordan, but if we just think about Jordan we're forgetting about McLaren-Mercedes and Ferrari," said Pollock. "Our goal has to be to try and get up there with McLaren and Ferrari. We finished fifth in the Championship last year, fourth equal on points with Benetton [who had more podium finishes]. What we have to do is try and improve that position, so if we're getting into fourth position it's already very, very good and it's going to be very, very difficult.

Pollock also believes Williams will be just as strong again this year, after it was the surprise package of 2000 and outpaced his team in testing at Kyalami in South Africa recently.

"The Williams car this year appears to be excellent," he added. "The BMW engine appears to be performing as well, so we cannot just think about Jordan as being the only competitor, we have to think about Williams, McLaren and Ferrari and trying to get up there, so we cannot focus too much on the Jordan-Honda team."

Jordan agreed with Pollock's sentiments, but the Jordan Grand Prix principal also took the opportunity to blow his Silverstone-based team's trumpet by reminding those assembled just who had broken the Ferrari-McLaren stranglehold in recent seasons.

"There's possibly too much attention paid to the perhaps rivalry between the two [Honda] teams, but BAR is not our [only] enemy," said Jordan. "All the teams are our enemy, including BAR, and we hope to try and beat them all. We have to be fairly realistic about this. We've been in it a bit longer than BAR, and we're the only team outside McLaren and Ferrari that are currently running to have won in the last three or four years. That's given us some advantage in terms of psychologically being able to understand what's needed to win in Formula 1 as a team."

Jordan, who pulled off one of the coup's of his career by netting a works Honda engine deal for 2001, says he thinks that having two teams running its engines will be better than one.

"The positive side is that there will be two teams with a huge amount of knowledge going back to Honda to make everything work better," said Jordan. "In their case on the chassis side [Honda engineers work with BAR on chassis development too] and on the engine side with us, combined together, and I think if we are really professional about it we can try to put two things aside. We are enemies on the track but to what we have in terms of equipment going to the track we should work in every way possible to help ourselves, to help our joint partners in Honda, and that will be my target."

Despite his talk of 'co-operation' away from the racetrack, Jordan is adamant that will end when the teams arrive in the paddock every fortnight.

"On the track it's a different story, we are out to destroy everybody if we can," declared Jordan. "It doesn't matter who they are and I don't even want to think about the names of the teams. Of course everybody talks about McLaren and Ferrari but, please believe me, the world has changed in Formula 1 since the major manufacturers have come in, so I think you're going to see a much closer championship in every respect all through the grid, there'll be lots of surprises. You know we finished third the year before last but we had a very bad the last year, so nothing is granted these days, but I'm really quite optimistic for this season."

Pollock, meanwhile, sees Honda's eight-man detail of chassis developers who work in its Bracknell base as a head start in the Japanese marque's affections as BAR goes into battle with Jordan.

"We have something slightly different from Jordan and that is that we don't just have engineers at the track, we have them on the chassis at the factory," he said. "I think this is very good for BAR, as we were a very young team and needed extra support, and I think it is also very good for Honda, training their chassis engineers. As we've gone through a programme together of training up engineers, the expertise Honda can bring to us can definitely be a help for the future."