19/06/2004
NEWS STORY
With the 2004 Formula One calendar featuring three lots of back-to-back events, team principals were asked their opinion of the format. Did the teams find it particularly arduous, and is it cost effective?
"Consecutive Grands Prix, as regards controlling our costs, have a relatively minimal impact," revealed Ron Dennis. "Obviously it's a shorter period of time that our people are away from home and therefore the fixed costs, hotels, those sorts of travel costs etc, tend to have some small impact on it, but as percentage of the whole cost, it's a relatively small percentage.
"Where the costs increase is that you have to have more people to cope with the workload," he continued, "and it's a more intense period of preparation because you're not going back to base and therefore you have to carry all the equipment and spares to maintain the cars between the events.
"So from a saving costs point of view, it's probably hard to say that there's any cost benefit at all.
"The biggest negative for us all is the tremendous pressures on the workforce," he added. "It probably impacts less on the people sat in front of you than it does on the guys who are preparing the cars or who direct responsibilities that involve them directly in the team operation. The pressure comes not necessarily on them physically but more on their family lives and the burn-out that negatively comes with personnel travelling around the world and that being impacting by these back-to-back races.
"But having said all of that, the teams all contribute to the view that a World Championship must be that and America and Canada is extremely important to our calendar. It obviously gives us the ability to attract some American investment into our sport and we wouldn't want to see these races move off the calendar. But we are all feeling the strain of what is going to be an 18 race series this year.
"I think the workforce, when we discussed it with them, would rather have two races back-to-back like this," said Eddie Jordan, "where they're not having to stay out, for example, the previous race between Indy and Japan they all stayed out and it was never viable either from a time-frame or cost to go back, so from that point of view, I would advocate strongly these back-to-back races because what it does do is take pressure off when we're trying to negotiate a calendar with Bernie and the other people involved in putting on the races, that the three week gap in the summer is still the most vital thing that we must preserve, because that does give a meaningful home life to people who have young families and that's the key. And if it means back-to-back, they should be retained.
"I think that the back-to-back for us has certainly worked with these two races," admitted Paul Stoddart, "but as Eddie said, when we had the 2002 situation with Japan when we were out for three and a half weeks, that does take a heavy toll on people's home lives. "
We as a team probably saved a little bit of money. We didn't quite get raped and pillaged on our freight charges as much as we would have if it had been two races instead of one.