Lauda supports new rules

Former Jaguar team principal Niki Lauda is in favour of the recent rule changes to Formula One and supported the FIA's decision to take matters into its own hands. Lauda admitted that if he had still been a team boss, he would probably have been ...

Former Jaguar team principal Niki Lauda is in favour of the recent rule changes to Formula One and supported the FIA's decision to take matters into its own hands. Lauda admitted that if he had still been a team boss, he would probably have been unhappy about some of the changes but the teams would never come to agreement on their own.

Niki Lauda.

Photo by Jaguar Racing.

"I think what has been changed is a big step forward," Lauda said at a news conference yesterday. "In the past the teams were thinking about what needed to be changed but they never could find an agreement, so finally Max (Mosley, FIA president) took over in a very dramatic way and changed a lot of things around. There are more unknowns now -- how the grid will be coming together."

The banning of refueling between qualifying and race is one of the rules that Lauda particularly supports: "I think altogether this is the best rule change I have ever seen in Formula One because it will make it more attractive," he said. "We will not have the same boring kind of races we had in the past and I think this was the biggest problem to overcome and I think it was a perfect job."

Traction and launch control, along with fully automatic gearboxes, will be banned from the British Grand Prix in July -- Lauda is happy about this too, saying the driver should be in control of the car, not computers.

"I was always complaining about all this computer help to the driver because in the end there's less effort for the driver to control the car if the computer does the job. All you do is push a button," the former champion added, in regard to launch control. "In the old days, if you screwed up the start at Monte Carlo where you have too much wheelspin you lost the race. So from the driver point of view it will be much more difficult, more exciting and you will see some differences in race results. I think this is what a race should be."