Max Mosley: First of all thank you all very much for coming. The purpose of this brief press conference today is to announce the appointment of AMD, represented here by Mr Henri Richard, as the official technology partners of the FIA. This is, for us, a very significant matter because they have already worked with us on the FIA/AMD survey which I think you're familiar with in principle, because some of the results have been released. But the full, raw data is now available on a compact disc for anybody who wants it, in the press centre and on our web site.

If I could just remind you, the main results of that survey were that 94 percent of our fans wanted more overtaking; 88 percent said that showcasing the skills of the drivers is the most essential aspect of Formula One; 80 percent agreed that advanced technology sets F1 apart, so the technology was important; 74 percent wanted more emphasis on driver skill; and 64 percent – a surprising amount – look forward to the technical innovations each season.

Now that is extremely important information for us because it has enabled us to target the regulation changes for 2008 in a much more efficient way. They will now reflect more accurately the views of the millions of fans worldwide than they would otherwise have done, based on more than 93,000 people filling in a very detailed questionnaire.

For that we are very, very grateful to AMD, and that was the first stage of our partnership. But a more important aspect of the partnership is about to begin. We have an issue in Formula One with overtaking. We didn't realise how important that was to the fans until recently. There was a theory that some people like basketball with lots of goals, some like football with few goals. Maybe overtaking wasn't so important, but 94 percent of the fans say that it is.

Now there have been various attempts to solve the problem which is that the car behind needs to be something like two seconds a lap faster, on the average circuit, before it can overtake the car in front. The only way to solve that problem is some really original thinking. We first attempted to solve the problem by saying ‘well, we will run some simulations and see what we do to the downforce to make overtaking possible' and the answer was 90 percent less downforce, much much bigger wheels and tyres. But I think everyone agrees that 90 percent less downforce, even with bigger wheels and tyres, would make the cars too slow - too slow compared to other forms of single seater motor racing, and therefore we would either have to change everything worldwide or find another solution.

Finding another solution means somebody has got to do something really clever and what AMD have done is make available to us an immensely powerful computer – it will be one of the most powerful in the world – which will enable us to run, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), a number of programmes which will be the equivalent to turning up here with two Formula One cars and a vast number of people who can make bits of pieces for you and trying all the different bits and pieces and getting two drivers to run round in different configurations, one against the other.

All of that we are going to be able to do on a computer, all of that we are going to be able to do before the end of the year so we that will be able to publish these regulations before the end of the year.

We think we know what to do. We have to validate it and then we have to optimise it and the calculating power to do that is immense. That's what AMD are making available to us and we are very grateful.

So that is the purpose of today's meeting and I'm going to ask Henri Richard to say a few words to you in a moment. Then if everybody's interested I can tell you where we've got to on our thinking about Formula One regulations for 2008, following the consultation period we have had since the beginning of July, but more of that in a moment. Henri Richard.

Henri Richard: Thank you Max. Well, first I want to thank you for being here, thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the sport of Formula One, and to help the FIA in this endeavour. As some of you may know, AMD has been involved in Formula One since 2002. We are a micro-processor company; we're all about bringing technology and innovation to the masses.

And what we have discovered with our involvement with Formula One is that one of the highest technology sports in the world where real information technology is now at the centre of performance, was not well understood by the fan base. You know, 20 years ago, the last people that would leave the pits were the mechanics. The reality is that today the last people that leave the pits are the software engineers and the hardware engineers. And that's not well understood in the market. We are all about bringing innovation and new micro-processor technology to the masses and we felt there was a huge opportunity to bring the customer base, the fan base, closer to the reality of the technology.

About a year ago Max and I were together and we were thinking about how could we do this? Well, one way was of course to sponsor this survey and help find out what was really important to the fans. Furthermore, we then realised that there were some challenges that the FIA was facing in order to bring new regulations and those challenges were actually easier to solve in the virtual world of computing and computational fluid dynamics than in the real world and so we decided to make available our 64 bit technology to the FIA in order to help them in that endeavour, and here we are.