Head discusses cost cutting

At the Austrian Grand Prix BMW Williams technical director Patrick Head spoke about some of the cost cutting measures that have been proposed recently. The controversy over keeping financial overheads down in Formula One has been a topic much debated recently and Head argues money must be used more efficiently.

"Spending money for no good reason is certainly not worthwhile," he said. "But I think we as a company have usually been pretty careful in terms of trying to make the best use of the money we have available and certainly, in terms of the budget we have available, it's very very much less than Ferrari have, for instance, So we have to be more effective, or try to be more effective and use our money more efficiently."

"But ultimately the teams nearer the front are obviously very wary about diminishing their power to make the best of their equipment and things like testing, although it is a law of diminishing returns, every day you go out testing you learn things the whole time and to some extent that's a large part of helping you to be reliable as well. Good engineering and good manufacturing standards are part of it but also the feedback you get in testing."

"Meanwhile there are certain elements in Formula One in terms of fairly expensive materials, there's a number of areas that could be discussed about saving costs in hardware, things like what materials one uses for suspension members or what type of brakes and different things one could use."

"But the thing is that they need to be discussed in a reasonably rational meeting and I haven't seen anything yet formed which I would call a rational meeting. In general, the team principals all sit on such different mountains that I don't think they are capable of having a productive, useful meeting on the subject in terms of talking about saving money on the engineering hardware. They certainly can probably look into the testing side and see where they can save money there."