So Irvine and Herbert were able to get down to some solid development work
Posted in General on 27. Jul, 2010
So Irvine and Herbert were able to get down to some solid development work in Jerez, which will be continued in Barcelona this week before the team returns to England for the official launch at Lord’s cricket ground next Tuesday.Irvine said he was “pleasantly surprised” by what he had found on his arrival “I’ve no idea how this team works yet,” he said “I’m still finding out who does what The car is very different from what I’ve been used to. No other team has so far managed to complete a new car for each of its drivers, and some of the biggest – McLaren, Ferrari, Williams, Jordan – have yet to unveil a single example of this year’s model. So we’ve got to be a little bit careful that our expectations aren’t too high – although, of course, mine are as high as anybody’s.”Strongly in their favour is the team’s achievement in building two of the new cars in time for last week’s tests in Jerez. But of course we’re running 20 years behind those teams, really, in terms of the curve of knowledge, the understanding that they’ve gained from the mistakes they’ve made over the years You don’t replace that overnight just by changing the name. Technically it’s still run in the same way, albeit with a few more people, which it needed anyway. But it has lost, to my way of looking at it, the family thing. As far as the outside world is concerned, now it’s another racing team on a level with Ferrari or McLaren.
He designed the first Jordan to win a grand prix, and did the same for Stewart after joining the team just over a year ago. But the era of the private entrant has been swept away by the renewed involvement of major manufacturers, and suddenly Anderson finds himself being offered personnel and technical assistance from Ford’s engineering departments all over the world.”For the first six months of being here I felt that we had a family-orientated team,” he told me, “with everything in place to build this small team to the level that I want to get to Now there’s obviously been a change Mainly it’s in the commercial and the marketing departments. The seriousness of the project was summed up in the thoughtful demeanour last week of Gary Anderson, the team’s technical director, for whom the change from Stewart to Jaguar has profound implications, not all of which he is keen to recognise. A large, comfortably unstylish Irishman who came into Formula One in the early Seventies as a £25-a-week mechanic with the Brabham team, Anderson has always preferred working for small outfits. Not coincidentally, the Baby Jag will be competing directly with the long-established BMW 3-series at the same time as the Bavarian company resumes its own involvement in Formula One.This is a high-stakes game, played not for baubles of the trophy cabinet but for the bottom line of a multinational corporation. Next year’s launch of a new small Jaguar, codenamed the X400 and nicknamed the Baby Jag, is aimed at attracting drivers younger than the pipe-and-slippers generation usually seen at the wheel of the company’s big saloons, and the quickest way to adjust the image is to associate the name with success in the glamorous high-performance world of grand prix racing.
A team which started with 75 employees three years ago now has a complement of 260, and is still growing. As a result, when the cars line up on the grid in Melbourne for the Australian Grand Prix on 12 March there will be intense pressure – not just corporate but from the media and the public – to produce results commensurate with thoseresources, and with the heritage behind the badge they bear.But Ford’s motive for sending the green cars into Formula One is nothing to do with sentiment. After three years of fighting the bigger boys, now the Stewarts have a budget from Ford – upwards of £100m a year, in all probability – that gives them facilities to match the best. When TWR’s Big Cats returned to Le Mans to record the company’s sixth and seventh wins in the 24-hour race, they were accompanied across the Channel by tens of thousands of fans waving flags and chanting slogans, bringing a hint of the football terraces to the Circuit de la Sarthe.The weight of expectation on the new Jaguar grand prix team, still under the control of Jackie and Paul Stewart, will be enormous. But it was not until the Eighties that the full measure of patriotic support for the team became apparent. In the Fifties, the swooping C-types and tailfinned D-types dominated the 24 Hours of Le Mans, then the world’s most famous race. In the Sixties the lightweight E-types were familiar GT contenders, followed in the Seventies by the modified XJ6 and XJS models run on the company’s behalf by Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR outfit.
Now he and Johnny Herbert, his new team-mate, have the responsibility of leading the attempt by the Ford Motor Company to use the expertise of the Stewart team, for which they paid the clan chief around £60m last year, as the basis for launching the hallowed name of Jaguar into the world of Formula One.All the historic victories that gave Jaguar’s reputation its lustre were achieved not with single-seater grand prix cars but with variations on the sort of cars that you could drive on the public road. In its place they will lay a new strip in a shade of green symbolising the entry of Jaguar, among the most resonant names in the history of British motor racing, into Formula One.
“The whole thing is going to be massive,” Eddie Irvine said last weekend, eating his lunch during a break from testing the new Jaguar R1 at the Jerez circuit in southern Spain “People don’t realise how big it’s going to be Particularly at Silverstone, of course. And I think we’re going to be seeing a few defections.”For the past three years some of those red flags were being waved in support of the Ulsterman, whose term as Michael Schumacher’s loyal lieutenant was rewarded by second place in the 1999 drivers’ world championship. But it’ll be interesting to see how much green there is around the rest of the circuits, because when you have Ferrari it’s full of red flags, all around the world. In its place they will lay a new strip in a shade of green symbolising the entry of Jaguar, among the most resonant names in the history of British motor racing, into Formula One. Some time this week the interior decorators will move into the factory complex in Milton Keynes and roll up the blue and red tartan carpet which has covered the long corridor outside Jackie Stewart’s office suite for the past three years. Next year the championship goes to Royal Lytham, and in 2002 the setting is Muirfield..
Some time this week the interior decorators will move into the factory complex in Milton Keynes and roll up the blue and red tartan carpet which has covered the long corridor outside Jackie Stewart’s office suite for the past three years. It has since been equalled by Steve Elkington and Colin Montgomerie in the 1995 US PGA Championship, when Montgomerie lost the play-off.”We are delighted that the Open Championship will be returning to Royal St George’s,” the secretary of the Royal and Ancient, Peter Dawson, said. “The links have been strengthened by the addition of several new championship tees and by the remodelling of the 14th hole. It will provide an excellent test of golf.”This year’s Open will be held at St Andrews (20-23 July).