Question: What is the situation coming here (Valencia)? What upgrades do you have on the car? How much are you working on this year’s and next year’s car?
Mario Theissen: We have brought an upgrade package here to Valencia. Two major issues: one is aero, including a new diffuser, and the other one is a lightweight chassis. It didn’t look bad today. The drivers especially think it is a significant step forward. I hope we can turn that into results tomorrow and on Sunday. On the future, obviously we are looking for investors to take over and continue with the team and as long as we are doing so, we will continue with next year’s car, F1 10, so the development programme is ongoing as planned.
Question: Mario, could you just summarize the situation with what happened and what is happening at the moment?
Mario Theissen: Well, what happened was a decision by the BMW board three weeks ago to pull out of F1 at the end of this season. Unfortunately, it happened during the factory shut-down, so we were able to discuss with our people, with the team, only this week. We are working on a solution for the team. The top priority is to find an investor to step in and take over the team and continue. As a consequence of this, the team has applied for an entry for next year, in time, last Monday. Now we are working and trying to come to a solution.
Question: Is it literally just trying to find investors to take over BMW’s shareholding?
Mario Theissen: It is clear that BMW does not want to be involved any further. Apart from that any solution is possible.
Question: And obviously the engine-side of things would close down altogether?
Mario Theissen: Yes.
Question: One of FOTA’s mission statements is to improve the show. In recent years, with different fuel loads in qualifying and the race, it has had the effect of constantly jumbling the race order throughout the race. Next year, basically all we are going to see is the fastest cars at the front disappear and the only factor will be tyre wear. Surely it is a mistake to not have refuelling next year?
Mario Theissen: I don’t expect any significant negative impact on the show from the refuelling ban. The pit stops will be even shorter, will be quite exciting and on the track, the impact of the… or the way the car handles and copes with the tyre and different tyre conditions has a much bigger impact than the fuel load. So I don’t think it will change much. On improving the show, there are certainly lots of ideas. We have discussed this about a year ago within FOTA or less than a year ago. Apparently it’s become second priority up to now because there were so many things to be sorted but now it can get priority one. Flavio is our expert on that and he is eager to take off.
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