Rahal: 'There was a Culture of Blame'

New Jaguar team boss Bobby Rahal is highly critical of the management system he inherited when he joined the team at the end of last year.

"The old culture, from what I could see, but what I also heard from within the industry from people that I respected, and from people within the team, that the old culture was one of blame," Rahal told Atlas F1. "There was very little accountability for one's actions."

On why he chose to make sweeping changes to the technical team, which included the sacking of technical director Gary Anderson, Rahal said: "I just felt that from a technical standpoint we needed a change of vision, there were a lot of things that were done over the course of the year, and from the outside looking in you have to wonder just what people were thinking about. More than anything though, I just felt that when you are trying to change the culture, you have to change the leadership."

A team spokesperson confirmed that it was a suspension failure that led to Luciano Burti's crash during yesterday's qualifying. The team also suffered a suspension failure during the last race of last year at Malaysia on Briton Johnny Herbert's car.