Willis: cost cuts via rules does not work

With the FIA due to unveil its plans for a new-look, low-tech F1 from 2008 later this week, Honda Racing's technical director Geoffrey Willis is fearful of any attempt to try and rid the sport of high-tech devices.

"It's been proven over the last ten years that regulation change simply does not control costs," he told Honda Racing's official website.

"Costs will only be reduced when teams have less money to spend. What regulation changes have done is to cause us to spend money unnecessarily and probably increase our costs.

"The financial implications, for instance, of going from the V10 to V8 are simply astronomical and they are unlikely to be fully compensated by any possible reduction in technology in the next few years."

Willis believes that banning technologies from F1 does not work in reducing costs because teams end up investing more money than ever in trying to find new ways of making cars go faster.

"It's the case that 'you can't put the genie back in the bottle'," he added. "Once we've discovered new technology and realised what benefits can be achieved in terms of car performance, if you then take that technology away you're not going to revert to 15-year-old technology; you're going to have find a new solution within the revised regulations.

"You see this example in other sports too, where they've tried to go back a decade and all that's happened is that those involved spend even more money mimicking the technologies that got banned. So trying to control costs via technical regulations is pretty much doomed to failure."

Willis has also expressed some reservations about attempts to increase overtaking in F1, which is being focused around the introduction of the radical Centreline Downwash Generation (CDG) wing.

"I'm never really sure quite where all this enthusiasm for overtaking in Formula One comes from," he explained. "We have a qualifying system where we spend most of the weekend ordering the cars in terms of their performance so we start the race with the fastest at the front and slowest ones at the back. The logic of that doesn't support any likelihood of overtaking.

"It's only if qualifying is disrupted that we get overtaking. However, if you assume that we really do want to see overtaking made easier, there are a number of options open to us. Clearly the 2005 aero regulations didn't help here.

"We've discussed this CDG wing idea at the last Technical Working Group. The concept has some merit but all agreed that quite a lot of development will be needed to make it work within the context of the 2008 technical regulations package.

"It's interesting to see new thinking being applied but, personally, I'd be concerned if overtaking became too easy."