David Brown at Valencia.

Q: You ran the F3000 McLaren junior team to maybe get away from Formula 1, and now here you are back again with the Jordan team. What prompted your return?
“Formula 3000 was an opportunity for me to do something rather than just engineering and it gave me a chance to run my own racing team, which is something I have always wanted to do, but also run my own team while McLaren sorted out the funding. Which are rather nice and unique circumstances. It gave me a great insight into far more facets of motor racing than I have ever experienced before. But the nature of Formula 3000 is that it is not particularly exciting technically and I felt that running a team was fine, but I wasn’t going to go any further than doing that inside McLaren. So when Eddie [Jordan] phoned me up and offered me a place in his team I thought: ‘that sounds just like the sort of thing I want to do.’ It’s different from what I’ve done before and so far it seems to be working ok.”

Q: Has Formula 1 changed a lot in the time that you’ve been away?
“Well, I last engineered a car at a Grand Prix in 1996, so it’s different. There’s much more communication because there are a lot more people and from that point of few, running a team is different because it’s so much more complex. There’s a lot more data, and everyone has to be able to communicate with everyone else. The basic problems with the cars are always similar in that you haven’t got enough grip, or that you need more grip at one end than the other and you’ve got the same basic tools to sort it out. The level of technology now, means that you’ve got a finer level of adjustment, but the rules are basically the same and at the end of the day you’re still trying to be first.”

Q: And has being a race engineer become more difficult since you first started working in F1?
“It’s different in that it is no longer a one-man job. Back in the dark days, even before I started doing it, a bloke would stand next to the car with a clipboard and he would almost do everything. He would have designed the car as well as engineered it, whereas now you engineer a car and have very little to do with the design. There are certain very old Williams cars that I worked on for which I still remember some of the dimensions because that was just part of the job and there weren’t as many people involved. Now it’s very different because there’s a much bigger environment. The problems are still the same, it’s just that now the box of bits to help sort out the problems is more complex which offers engineers more opportunities to get it right. It is very, very competitive and you are looking for such small differences. The differences in lap-times are extremely small and the level of technology and quality of engineering and design is very, very high. You’re looking for advances in areas where before it would have been too finer choice.”

David Brown at Valencia.

Q: How does the structure at McLaren compare to that at Jordan?
“There’s a different scale of organisation between McLaren and Jordan. I don’t personally believe that you have to have an enormous racing team to have a good one - which is why I’m here. Continued success in Formula 1 gives you the opportunity to be well-funded and enables you to afford the best of everything, but you don’t have to have it to be good.”

Q: It’s very early on in the development process and the run up to next year, but how do you think Jordan will fare in 2001?
“Well, as you say, it is very early and we haven’t run the new car yet. We’ve got the deal with Honda, which I think is very important, not just from a propulsion point of view, but also because they are going to have an involvement with the entire team. Obviously they have a very good engine and we’re going to have better engines than we had last year but Honda will be involved in many facets of Jordan and that’s going to help us a lot.”

Q: Jordan will use the same engines as BAR next year, how much will you use them as a benchmark for the team’s competitiveness?
“There is bound to be a comparison drawn between us and BAR, so basically, we’ll just have to beat them.”

Q: With traction control potentially returning next year, do you think it will level the playing field not only between the teams, but also between the drivers, in that people with less throttle control will be able to perform better?
“I engineered cars in an era when we had active ride, traction control, ABS, power brakes and all of those gizmos and you wouldn’t say that the racing was particularly uninteresting in those days. It just made the teams have to grow very quickly and be very, very careful about what they did from an electronic point of view. It’s massively complex and the best teams still do the best job. Alain Prost won the championship in 1993 with an active car and ABS and all the rest of it, but he was the best peddlar around at the time as well. It didn’t mean that Joe Bloggs could have jumped in the car and gone as quick as him. It still takes the right driver.”

Q: But is it right that a driver aid should be allowed to return simply because it can’t be effectively policed?
“It does sound like an odd way of looking at things and you wouldn’t base a system of justice on that premise in that you wouldn’t say, ‘we won’t punish you because we’re not sure what crime you’ve committed even though we know you’ve committed a crime’. But motor racing isn’t like that because it’s a competition and that will always make the rules slightly different. I don’t think they [the FIA] can control it anymore, and to have everybody in the pitlane thinking things aren’t fair or to have people saying ‘we know you’re cheating, but we don’t want to say in public’ is not correct. It’s not good for the competition and it’s not good for motor racing. It’s far better to have rules which allow people the flexibility to do their job while being able to control them, rather than have rules which you can’t control, because then everybody’s under suspicion.”