Tony Dodgins: F1's Inside Line

Delightfully for foodies, most of us in other words, Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons has become a diary fixture for Honda's pre-Christmas press lunch. For those who don't know, it's an award- winning Oxforshire hotel/restaurant and home to Raymond Blanc's famous cookery school.

They say the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and Nick Fry seems to have taken that on board. But last year he was also able to reflect on Jenson Button's first win as well as taking great pleasure in reminding everyone Honda won more races than McLaren in 2006.

But at the end of a season as dire as the one Honda has just endured, I wondered what Nick might come up with this time. He seemed drastically short of ammo when it came to boasting rights...

"First of all," he opened up with a smile, "we've just had a board meeting and I'm pleased to say I'm still here!" When he looked at the stats he realised he has now outlasted both Craig Pollock and David Richards in the job.

It can't have hurt Fry's cause that he recently announced the arrival of Ross Brawn. I always got the impression that Brawn and Honda was a good bet. But, with the F1 paddock blowing more whistles than Pierluigi Collina throughout last summer, the Japanese were paranoid that some mud might somehow stick to Ross. When it didn't, the announcement wasn't long coming.

Ross too was on duty at Le Manoir. He explained how, after such a long time battling with teams at the forefront of F1, it had been refreshing to head off on his sabbatical with his fishing rods. He started in Argentina where, in predator-free rivers, it was possible to land 30lb brown trout! He watched the races on TV and Fry kept in touch by phone, every few weeks.

"For a while I just enjoyed myself, but I knew that come June or July I would have to make up my mind about coming back to F1. Someone told me to sit down and make a list of all the things I liked about F1 and all the things I didn't, then weigh it up."

So, what was at the top of the dislike list?

"Politics and media intrusion," he said immediately. "The politics can be really wearing and time-consuming."

And the media intrusion?

A wry grin. "I'm not talking about the specialist press, but some of the rest of it. For example, for months at Ferrari I was supposedly having an affair. And, true enough, I was seen having lunch many times with the same young woman. But it was my daughter. Who happened to be working at Ferrari..."

Surely, though, that was just funny?

"Well, yes and no. My wife didn't like it. Obviously she knew I wasn't having an affair with our daughter but she didn't like the idea of so many people thinking badly of me. And," he went on, "it'll be nice to go to a race without feeling someone's looking over your shoulder."

In the Benetton days you could wander up to Ross and sound him out. And, largely, be grateful for the common sense you'd get back. Some of it, you knew and he knew, wouldn't end up in print. But at Ferrari you were supposed to make an appointment. Or attend a mass debrief. Everyone chaperoned. Everything recorded. And everything scrutinised in great detail by Luca di Montezemolo on Monday morning. Not the most fruitful environment, that.

Ross, although no doubt encouraged by a healthy stipend, is an admirer of Honda's DNA and philosophy, which has always been engineering-led. As the company's Otmar Szafnauer says, even the current F1 project was, 'Okay guys, we're going racing and this is what we want out of it technically. We might as well send some marketing guys along to net some spin-offs.' 'Twas never the other way round.

Bearing that in mind, a couple of things took me aback last year. The first was Gary Anderson explaining precisely why Honda's front wing wouldn't work, merely by studying a drawing. Then there was engineering director Jacky Eeckelaert talking about Honda's computational fluid dynamics.

"CFD is increasingly important and it gives you much better optimised aero sections," Jacky explained. "We've developed ours in the tunnel whereas others do CFD to get the sections and use the tunnel to get the assembly. When I arrived in '06, the team was quite poor in terms of CFD capacity compared to Sauber, where I'd come from."

You thought F1 and squillions of dollars added up to mega sophistication, right? Basically, the CFD dept was pretty much nonexistent, and I asked Fry about that last week. Honda Racing's CFD operation, it seems, was inherited when Reynard went bust. Problem was, it had a load of outside contracts and was not bespoke to the racing team. It was developing Volvo underbodies, gas masks for the military and, I kid you not, the aero profile of snowflakes for a German who sold kids' snowdomes. Which takes you a fair way down the road to understanding why the RA107 was such a pile of poop.

That, and the fact that when things had gone belly-up a year earlier, the Japanese predilection for falling on swords had punctured Geoff Willis, who happened to be the only fellow who understood the car. Nothing to do with Fry, this. At the same time as the Japanese started to invest megabucks, they put in charge Shuhei Nakamoto, whose F1 experience was precisely zilch. Hardly surprising, then, that Nakamoto-san was not instantly clued in to where to prioritise his spend.

But don't worry. Ross is onto it. More than one person has pointed out to me that they'd fancy their chances of becoming a strategy genius if they had Michael Schumacher in their cockpit. But Brawn is so much more than that. He won't do it overnight, but let's see how long it takes him. Let's hope it's soon enough for Jenson.