On whether Williams' situation as one of the last indpendent teams was done through force or from choice:
Well obviously, we would like to be a major manufacturer partner. And we had that situation with BMW. But the relationship didn’t work out. I think they’re now doing a lot of things for their own team that they should have been doing with us. They were not supporting us financially in any serious way at all, what ever they say. So personally, I think that the plan was in place in some of the minds of the people in BMW well before the end - maybe two or three years - before the end of the relationship that intention was there. Because if they had supported us, I think we’d be much better off. But in truth we had to, by their insistence, we had to tie in on cooperation with them. But it was all one way, we had to give them everything aerodynamically, everything gearbox, and we never saw anything back. Now I’m sure it’s of use to them in developing their people. But it was a relationship that unfortunately went wrong. I think it was unfortunate that it did, but it did go wrong. But we have had many successful relations with big companies before that, so if the situation arises again I’m sure we’d be a good partner for a major manufacturer.
On the strengths and weaknesses of the Williams team:
Strengths, I think we’re very quick responding. We have a very quick capability of being able to decide to do something, do the R&D necessary for it, turn it into a design and manufacture it and bring it to the track. I think we’ve still got to develop our capability of deciding exactly what we should be using that resource on. I think it’s getting a lot better now than it was a year ago. And we’ve got a very good team of people together now, which I think is a good strength. We’ve got a much stronger definition within the factory of responsibility, and good people in the top positions - in charge of transmission, in charge of suspension, in charge of aerodynamics. So I think there’s a lot of progress. Meanwhile, it’s quite difficult on a limited budget to compete with some of the bigger teams. But then that’s a problem we made for ourselves by being uncompetitive in 2005 and 2006.
On how many years he thinks Williams can survive in its current situation:
I think we would survive, but we want to do a lot more than survive. You can always sort of shrink a team down, and have less people, and whatever. But that’s just if you’re making up the lower places. But I don’t think Frank and I, either of us really have an interest in running Williams in that way. So, yes, we’ve got some very significant challenges ahead, and we’re not blind to those challenges, and we’re trying to work out how we meet and rise to those challenges in terms of improving our budget position and in terms of improving our capability.
On the interesting situation of the on-track battle the team has with its own engine provider, the Toyota team:
We’re trying to do the best we can with our car. And where that comes out between us and Toyota is not really immaterial, but it’s not really part of our thinking. Because we don’t think that if we beat Toyota we’re doing OK. Because I think the Toyota engine is probably as good as any of the engines and the padlock, and maybe better than many of them. So beating Toyota in itself is not our target. We want to get ourselves up into competing with Ferrari and McLaren. And that’s our challenge.
On whether the new rule freezing the development of the engines makes it possible for them to have much better results than would have been possible in the past for customer teams:
Well I think the price of the engines should eventually come down a bit, if there is stability on R&D. And that’ll obviously help customer teams. We actually set our agreement with Toyota, and the commercial side of it, before there was agreement about homologation of the engines. And they’ve had to do a lot of work obviously to achieve the homologation, blueprinting everything and putting work into that. In truth, I think it’s probably better for us. Yes. Thank you Max.
