From the Pulpit

The car that wins the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix will (almost certainly) not be powered by a Cosworth engine, but that should not prevent us all from paying public homage to the wonderful job that the boys from Northampton have done these past few months.

It isn't often that something can accurately be described as both cheapest and best, but received paddock wisdom suggests that, at the moment, the latest Cosworth V8 is indeed both those things.

All teams routinely carry out acoustic analysis of their own and one another's engines during tests - and, although all engineers tend to be obdurately tight-lipped about their own motor's rpm and bhp figures, they're often only too willing to reveal (off the record, of course) their estimates of rivals' grunt. The likelihood, then, derived via averaging out such nudges and winks, is that the new Cossie tops the list with 745bhp.

We know that the Williams FW28 that this punchy V8 will propel isn't ugly, but we don't yet know whether it's good or bad. And we don't know that because it has been running, and will continue to run, on Bridgestones - and, compared with the latest Michelins on which Anthony Davidson's Honda 008 stopped the clocks at 1:08.540 for a lap of Valencia last Friday, the Bridgestones are looking pretty bad. This, despite the fact that the development budget that created the Japanese rubber significantly eclipses what Michelin spend annually on Formula One.

The Cosworth V8 exposed at Sakhir this week © XPB/LAT

Parenthetically, Davidson's astonishingly rapid lap has been discounted by some as an ultra-low-fuel ballast-free freak. Well, maybe so. But it still struck fear into the hearts of many a Renault and/or McLaren engineer, and for very sound reasons.

Unlike McLaren and Renault, who tend to test with 50kg of fuel on board as a default option, Honda usually run on 25kg. And, unlike Renault and McLaren, who pride themselves on never taking the fuel out, let alone the ballast, in order to carve a lap time whose purpose is to make the evening's headlines on autosport.com and thereby give their sponsorship-acquisition guys a sexy sales pitch... well, Honda (and B.A.R-Honda before them) have shown themselves over the years to be only too willing to showboat in that way.

In other words, it's inconceivable that Davidson's mega lap was the first artificially low-fuel one driven around Valencia by a Honda driver this winter, and yet it was considerably faster than the car had ever gone before. That looks like improvement to me - genuine improvement.

Anyway, let's get back to Bridgestone looking bad. I should add at this point that these things are relative, and by "bad" I mean that, in dry conditions, their tyres are something like half a second per lap slower than Michelin's.

But it could have been worse. When Michael Schumacher first tried Bridgestone's new-for-2006 dry tyre, I gather he declared it to be "too peaky" and "too tricky on the limit" and politely suggested they bin it and think again.

The Japanese listened respectfully, but, before doing as bidden, as they would have had no choice other than to do in previous years (when practically all Bridgestone's tyre development work was shouldered by Ferrari), they decided to try the despised-and-rejected rubber on Williams.

And so it was that Alex Wurz, whose sage counsel my sources within Michelin admit they've been missing this winter, got to try Schumacher's rejects at Jerez - and, having encountered the same peakiness of which Schumacher had complained, then painstakingly went on to find an approach and a set-up that made the new tyres work, recording the fastest time that the interim FW27 had ever recorded at that dusty, tricky track. What's more, the next day the Wurz formula worked for Nico Rosberg, too, and more fast laps were the result.

Now, that tyre - the tyre that Michael recommended Bridgestone abandon - is the one that he and all the other Bridgestone runners will be running in Bahrain.

Alexander Wurz tops the times at Jerez in his Bridgestone shod Williams-Cosworth FW28; February 7th, 2006 © LAT

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the best (and cheapest) engine, the Cosworth, will be mated to the worse (and most expensively developed) tyre, the Bridgestone. As a result, the Williams FW28 won't win in Bahrain, which is where we came in.

It won't win because, bluntly, tyres are a hell of a lot more critical when it comes to delivering lap time than are engines (which, while we're about it, makes it all the more ridiculous that Formula One's six car manufacturers now spend, collectively, around US$1 billion chasing horsepower each year).

Which leaves poor little Cosworth in danger of not being able to demonstrate the stonking power of their latest V8 - and, if the scenario becomes a worst-case one, losing their much-prized new Williams contract after a single year as a result.

Because although the Williams engineers know exactly how good the latest Cossie is, the fact remains that it lacks prestige next to a works Toyota deal. And Williams's sponsorship-acquisition men need all the prestige they can muster - as do all their rivals, incidentally - in order to continue to attract the big names with the big money.

Personally, I hope the guys who control these big sponsors' purse strings take the trouble to find out how good the latest Cosworth is, and that they aren't simply blinded by the early-2006 pace of the Michelin runners - nor, indeed, naively insistent that, in order to receive their backing, Williams ditch Cosworth for Toyota engines in 2007. Because, next year, when everyone will be on Bridgestones, the effectiveness of the Cosworth - and the speed of the cars which are powered by it - will be clear for all to see.

Cheapest and best. What better epitaph could there be for the great Keith Duckworth than that? And what better way could there be of commemorating the 30-year anniversary of the birth of his finest creation, the all-conquering Cosworth DFV V8 of 1967, than if Williams, running on the same Bridgestone tyres as everyone else and therefore not rubber-disadvantaged as they are now, won Grands Prix with Cosworth in 2007?