On whether Williams should be considered a so-called "B-team" to Toyota:
No I don’t think so. Our relationship with Toyota is good, but we’re not operating as the Toyota B-team. We just have an agreement with them, a commercial agreement, for the purchase of an engine. And it is agreed that that engine will be to the same standard, and run to the same standard, as the engines in their car. I think a B-team would probably have a much closer integrated connection with a major manufacturer than we have. We are a customer team, if you like.
On the team's current budget:
We have to cut our cloth closely, because obviously in the last two or three years our performance has been poor. And it’s very difficult for Frank and his marketing department to sell our future on the basis of a season like 2006, so we are certainly having to cut our cloth very closely. It was the reason that we didn’t test in Bahrain in February, because it was £250 000 that we thought that we could better spend in other places. But we’ll survive.
On what percentage of an ideal budget Williams has:
We’d very happily double our budget. Many of the teams in the pit lane are operating on double our budget. And more.
On what he would do with the extra money if given that budget now:
Inevitably, we would probably expand our R&D and engineering side. It would be spent on increasing our ability to work on multiple projects at the same time. The difficulty in competing with these - very good, and I’m not complaining about it – but these major manufacturer teams, they have such breadth of capability at working on multiple projects. I saw Nick Fry was saying that there were 250 engineers in Japan working on their chassis side - gearbox, suspension, and all that sort of stuff. As is usual, as you spend money on something, it becomes like that: you don’t get as much value out of the second hundred million dollars as you do out of the first hundred million dollars.
On whether the bigger teams waste a lot of money:
I’m sure that they're not deliberately wasting any money. But inevitably, if you cover all points and maybe have multiple projects going and maybe sometimes have more than one team competing with each other on different projects internally, then your effective use of money is not as high. I’m not sure where the point is at which you’d start calling it wasting money. I don’t know.
