We Are the Champions Again: Interview with Pat Symonds

TD: This year must rank right up there with your best seasons?

Pat Symonds: "It's too bloody long!"

TD: Does winning the Championship without the quickest car remind you of 1994?

Symonds: "In '94 we started with the quickest car but then they changed the rules on us and it was difficult to adapt. But in '95 I agree, the Williams was a better car than the Benetton. But you're so right and I don't really know how to put it. Yes, the McLaren's a quicker car, but that's all really.

"I think that as a team we've performed better and included in that is the strategic decisions of making sure that the reliability is there, as much as anyone can. We put a lot of effort into that. Last year I was upset about our reliability. We threw away golden opportunities in the US and Canadian Grands Prix. So there was a lot of focus on that and operating the team well. I'm pleased with what we've achieved."

TD: When you arrive at the first test and go quick immediately, how much does it lift the whole team and how important is that? Was it '94 all over again?

Symonds: "For sure. It's really interesting, you know. These days we measure everything in sight, there's virtually nothing on the car we can't measure. We do so much more computer-aided engineering before the car is even built but, in spite of all that, that first day, when the driver climbs out of the new car, is just so telling. It's unbelievable. And probably a lot to do with that bit nobody quite understands - the interface between man and machine.

"I remember it so well in '94, when Michael [Schumacher] got out of the B194, because the '94 car was a super car at the beginning of the year before the planks and diffuser cuts and so on. And this year was exactly the same. The 2004 car wasn't bad - it was third in the Championship and second for a long time - but [Giancarlo] Fisichella found it very difficult when he drove it in the winter. But when he drove the R25 it was like 'Wow!'

"We were a little bit worried because obviously the downforce had been reduced and we'd done that on the R24 so that they didn't just think, well, this car's got no downforce, but it was still so nice when they got out and just had so much confidence in it."

TD: Did you set out to make the car more driveable?

Symonds: "Yes. Last year's car was very nervous, very unpredictable, especially when it was bumpy, so it was particularly gratifying to get the pole at Interlagos. It was a difficult thing to sort out. If you analyse your car and are low on downforce or power, you go to your wind tunnel or dyno and you work bloody hard at some targets. But things like nervousness and unpredictability and, to a certain extent, poor ride, are much more esoteric. It's gratifying that after so much work to figure out what was going on, we made so much progress."

TD: Can you explain how you sorted out the R25? Did you make it stiffer?

Symonds: "The amount of work that went in and the things we learnt along the way... maybe I'm being arrogant and everyone else knew them, but I think we learned a lot and we're not about to make it public!"

TD: Did the engine concept help the stiffness?

Symonds: "Not really. With a narrow angle vee it's easier to make the beam stiffness better, the vertical bending if you like, but in terms of torsional stiffness it's no better."

TD: Is it correct to assume that because of the downforce limitations people spent even more time chasing aero gains?

Symonds: "I don't think so, because the incentive to chase aero is so high anyway that it's almost getting to the point where you are running your wind tunnel so damned hard that the only way you can move forward is to have another one, as many people are doing. So I don't think we are working any harder on it, but having said that we have increased the shifts in the wind tunnel. That's purely because a little bit more money became available and that's where we decided to spend it.

"But it's very significant that we had some quite fundamental changes to aerodynamics, the biggest we've had for a few years, and I do think we came out of the blocks in Melbourne with a better aero package than our competitors. Not as much as you might think because McLaren were there at Melbourne. They had a terrible start to the season but if you step back and look at those last few tests in Europe before the season started, there was just nothing between McLaren and us. They had a very bad start and that made us look very good.

TD: Are you working with more than one wind tunnel?

Symonds: "We obviously have our tunnel on site, which is very close to 24/7 now, and we also work with Fondmetal in Italy. A fair few hours go in there and it's a sort of interim step to having two tunnels. The trouble is that for a second tunnel these days, the actual capital investment is so high it's horrific."

TD: Did you lose your starting advantage this year?

Symonds: "Yes, no doubt about it. I was absolutely amazed that we had that for more than two years. It really, really surprised me. But there were some subtle changes to the regulations. Or to be accurate, to clarifications of the regulations. We suffered quite a lot from them. We don't expect to gain at the start anymore. Occasionally you get a lovely one like Turkey, which was just like the old days!"

TD: You've had good straightline speed for the first time in a long while?

Symonds: "Yes, it's a combination of two things. The aero package has been fantastic and the engine is a very significant step from last year. It's the same basic architecture and design philosophy but there's a hell of a lot more there."

TD: Renault did a flat engine, which was quite innovative, and then cancelled it. Was that important in establishing reliability?

Symonds: "One of the things I like about our team is that we are lateral thinkers in every respect. Of course sometimes we get it wrong and I think we'd all look back at the wide-angle vee and say it was wrong. It was done for all the right reasons but there was a fundamental there that we didn't appreciate at the time and ultimately it was wrong.

"But we are quite innovative. Talking about starts, our control systems were very innovative. And even the way we go racing and our strategic approach, the way we operate our team, is. We actually love change because we normally profit by it. It's not just reacting quickly, it's reacting with this lateral thinking. Without saying too much, you can look at the teams and see the ones that just go in a straight line and don't deviate. We're hopping all over the place and some of it works."

TD: How does that stack with the continuity everyone seems to think is so important in F1 these days?

Symonds: "You need to be constant in your philosophy and if your philosophy is to be radical, you can say that's a constant! If you go back to the Heathrow testing agreement where everyone said you can't have a top team doing that, we thought, well, actually, that might be very good. Some people tend to accept the first thing they think of whereas we look at everything in a lot of detail."

TD: Were you luckier than McLaren that the failures you had tended to be on the second car?

Symonds: "I don't believe in luck. You make your own. The total number of failures is less than McLaren and that's not luck, that's philosophy again. What I was upset about last year we worked on and it paid off. If you're driving your car around the track and it gets struck by lightning I might be prepared to accept that's luck, but there aren't many things that are."

TD: Did you change anything in your testing approach this year?

Symonds: "Not a lot, to be honest. The testing agreements continue to play into our hands because a lot of teams have had to restrict their testing but we haven't. The testing agreement has been the amount of testing we have run with for many years. Again, we cannot afford to have two test teams."

TD: Has tyre choice been critical on certain occasions this year?

Symonds: "Yeah. It's been more difficult this year for two reasons. One is that because you only have two sets of tyres on Friday rather than three, you cannot really assess that first lap advantage one tyre to another. No matter how you do it, you can't ask the driver to get in and, from lap one, drive 100%. It just doesn't happen. When you had three tyres you could go round on one of them, get the car sorted out, play the driver in, get a nice balance on it and then do a good tyre test for the first lap performance. But you just can't do that anymore.

"The other thing that's more difficult is that typically we were running a tyre in a race for, let's say, 60 miles. To know what a tyre is going to do over 60 miles you probably only need to do 20 miles on it. But now we want the tyre to do 200 miles, and in some cases you actually only know when you've done 200. You can forward predict a little bit, but it's not as easy. Those two factors together have made it more difficult to make tyre choices."

TD: You see test drivers doing 140 laps in a day now. Is that too much?

Symonds: "Well we had one test, I can't remember where, when Giancarlo did three race distances on the same day! That's hard..."

TD: I've heard talk of testing outside Europe this winter. Do you think that's going to happen?

Symonds: "No, I don't. Bernie has proposed some tests in Bahrain. Well, I say I don't think it's going to happen but I can't say that, can I? What I can say is that we won't, because it's so expensive it's madness. We just can't afford that. Bahrain is something like 12 dollars per kilo air-freight and we'd be sending a bit more than a suitcase!

TD: Tim Densham is not a high profile designer. What can you say about him?

Symonds: "Tim's been around a long time. He's a good old Englishman - very pedantic, methodical and with real attention to detail. He produces a lovely car, every little bit of it thought out. You sometimes get designers who are so focused on aerodynamics that they make an aerodynamic device that is an absolute nightmare to work on. Or it has some little bits that you just know are going to fall off. Tim is mechanical but he appreciates what the aero guys want and he knits it together into a really practical, good racing car. He's very under-rated, a great designer."

TD: It seems that quite a lot of 'names' have left without any detrimental effect?

Symonds: "It's funny. We have had some big names go, starting with Mike [Gascoyne, to Toyota] and John Iley to Ferrari, but we're a big team now - I think it's 519 at Enstone now - and there's a lot of depth. That compares to around 250 people in '94."

TD: Is Fernando Alonso more tactically aware than Michael Schumacher was at a similar stage?

Symonds: "He's equal. He's very good at understanding the race and very aggressive. His first laps are normally quite pleasurable and he understands the race and the important parts of it. That just so mirrors what Michael was like."

TD: Does he like testing as much as Michael?

Symonds: "I've never known a driver who likes testing as much as Michael!"

TD: When you see Alonso's in-car pictures, his steering inputs are aggressive but there's only one, whereas others seem much less consistent?

Symonds: "It really is quite an unusual driving style and that describes it exactly. It's very rapid inputs but very precise actually. When I first saw it I thought, crikey, this guy really gets on with it. Aggressive is just the word. But when you look at the data and overlay lap after lap, it's also very consistent."

TD: Many predicted that the tyre rules would suit Fisichella better?

Symonds: "Fisi has had such a difficult season that it's a little bit hard to quite put it all in place. Fisi is a fantastic driver but he's up against someone who must be acknowledged by everyone to be one of the three best in the world. And he matches Fernando quite often. He's not had a great year but it was an absolutely fabulous qualifying lap to be third on the grid at Interlagos after being first out. Fernando might be aggressive in how he uses the car, but he's much more aggressive on the front end and so when you watch the in-car stuff you see these massively fast steering movements, but what you don't see is that the throttle control is actually quite smooth. So it might actually be giving a slightly false impression."

TD: You lost out a little when Fisi stalled in the pits at Magny Cours and Silverstone. You had a new engine spec, I believe, so what was happening?

Symonds: "It's actually quite an awkward one to explain, because I know what you're getting at -- whose fault was it!"

TD: No I'm not, I'm asking what happened. Because I gather it happened to Fernando a couple of times in testing and very nearly in the races as well?

Symonds: "That's pretty much true. But this is just the sort of thing where it becomes quite difficult to talk about whether the driver made a mistake. The fact is that the engine at that stage of the season was very difficult to take from idle revs up to higher revs. It was difficult to get it to move."

TD: But what made it that way, from one race to another?

Symonds:" The specification of the engine, and that's as much as you're getting! What you said is quite true, Fernando did have some problems in testing and got close to having them in the race, and Giancarlo just stepped over that mark a couple of times in the race. So it became quite a public thing.

"But do you say that's the driver's mistake? I have a bit of difficulty with that because I think that our job as engineers is to make useable objects, whether they are racing cars or washing machines. You have to look at how we solved the problem, and we didn't do it by training the drivers. Well we did initially, but we actually solved it by looking at why the engine was so critical and altering the specification, to be nice and vague!"

TD: I'm not going to get much further with that, am I?

Symonds: "Very perceptive man!"

TD: What were the key changes to the car for Brazil?

Symonds: "We had an engine step and the rest of the things were aerodynamic. A totally new floor, bargeboards and the flicks on the bodywork are all different. You can't call it a B car, it's more like a Z. These days you are doing things every race but there was a lot more on this package than normal."

TD: Can you win the Constructors' Championship as well?

Symonds: Well, the McLaren is quicker than us, there's no question, but the step that we made for the last three races is significant and with the Drivers' Championship won, we can give it a real go. There's only two points in it and over two races, anything can happen."

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