02/07/2004
NEWS STORY
Good afternoon everybody, thank you so much for coming. It's very pleasing to see so many of the press here and thank you for being here.
What I would like to do if you would allow me is to …. Four topics before inviting questions. They are the two incidents in Indianapolis which I think need a little bit of discussion, and the question of the rules for the Formula One in the future and then finally my imminent departure from the FIA. So those four topics.
If I could begin just briefly with the Ralf Schumacher accident at Indianapolis. I think there was a lot of misunderstanding among the media because he was there, in the car, not moving for rather more than one and a half minutes and this was widely criticised. It's important to understand why that happened, and if you will allow me a little bit of medical explanation - not being a doctor but nevertheless - the situation is this. If in the worst case, a driver is dead in the sense that his heart has stopped and he's not breathing, provided you can get a reanimation expert or resuscitation expert to him within two minutes, it's possible to start the heart again and get the circulation going and keep him sufficiently alive to go on a life support machine when you get him to hospital without him suffering irreversible brain damage. You then decide what to do.
Now, after two minutes, taking into account the time for resuscitation, irreversible brain damage can occur and shortly after that, death. Now this particular situation doesn't occur in everyday life. If you have a serious accident and somebody's heart has stopped and he's not breathing, the chance of somebody being anywhere near him who can resuscitate him unless he's in a hospital, is minimal. So it doesn't really arise in road accidents.
In Formula One, for some considerable time, we've had a system in place where we arrange the medical cars around the circuit in such a way that within two minutes there is always a resuscitation expert there so we can always get the circulation going sufficiently to get him on a life support system without irreversible brain damage and that's existed for a number of years, as I say.
So the first thing is that we must have that man there within two minutes. The second thing is that everyone's instinct, particularly if you see somebody motionless in a car, is to rush in and try and help him. In fact it's the most dangerous thing you can do. If he's got a broken neck or a broken spine, the one thing you don't want is an enthusiastic amateur trying to help, above all, not trying to get the helmet off. It doesn't matter if it takes one and a half, two minutes to get somebody there because even if he has stopped breathing, you can still fix it.
What does matter is if the wrong person does the wrong thing. So therefore there is this absolutely strict instruction: leave him alone, wait until the experts get there, they will be there within two minutes. That is the time. Don't get involved. So that's what we say to the marshals.
Now you will have noticed at Indianapolis there were marshals the other side of the pit wall. There is one circumstance in which all of those precautions are forgotten and that is if the car catches fire. Obviously then if somebody is motionless in a car, you must get him out of the car because it's on fire, you must take whatever risk you have to take. But nowadays, we very much hope that we don't get cars catching fire. If they do catch fire, then obviously we would have to act.
Final point on that: the marshals were there, why didn't they go to him? There was nothing they could do because they were instructed not to touch him. All that would happen is that there is still a small risk, however hard we try, that another car crashes into the car that is stationary. In that case, the two drivers are at risk, but it would be completely stupid to allow marshals also to be at risk, bearing in mind that they can't do anything, they are not allowed to do anything. They would simply be standing there risking their lives to no purpose.
So the procedure with Ralf Schumacher… it looks terrible because you feel instinctively I must get in there, I must do something but in fact exactly the right procedures were followed and as it happens, he was hurt but he wasn't seriously hurt but had he been, all the right things were done.
So that was Ralf Schumacher. I just wanted to make that clear because it didn't look right but it was right.
Montoya. I've got enormous sympathy for Montoya and I think the press were right when they say it's terrible that he did so many laps and was then excluded. However, when… the rule, rightly or wrongly, but it's a rule that all the teams wanted and agreed, if he leaves the grid after the 15 seconds, before the cars depart, he's broken the rule and can't take part in the race.
In fact the amount of time involved was three seconds. We knew it was very marginal, therefore our people had to get every possible piece of information: videos, timing sheets, witness statements and so on. Get all that information together to be quite certain that he really did infringe the rule by, as it turns out, three seconds.
Now, had we not done a thorough job, and had somebody for example, come with a video after he'd been excluded immediately and demonstrated that he was within the rule, it would have been a terrible situation for everybody, because it's like executing somebody, you can't un-execute them. Once you've put him out of the race, he's out, so you must not put somebody out of the race unless you are absolutely certain.
They had to gather all the evidence. When they'd gathered all the evidence, they then had to give it to the stewards, the stewards had to satisfy themselves that the evidence did indeed prove beyond any doubt, that which it appeared to prove, namely that he was three seconds outside the time and they were able to take action and do the necessary.
Now that evidence had to be gathered while there were three significant on-track emergencies and as far as I'm concerned I would far rather that the driver goes around a few more laps than is necessary, because they do that all the time anyway in testing and so on, than to exclude someone from a race and later learn that he shouldn't have been excluded from the race. That would be very very unfortunate and indeed we would never hear the end of it, and quite rightly we wouldn't hear the end of it.
So that's the Montoya incident, but again, forgive me for the explanations but it's very important that everyone understands that it's not quite as unfortunate as it looks.
My third point is the rules. Now there has been endless discussion, endless confusion but we've now reached a point where on Tuesday next, Tuesday the sixth of July, Charlie Whiting is going, on behalf of the World Motorsport Council, to give formal notice to the technical working group under the terms of article 7.5 of the Concorde Agreement that they must produce proposals for slowing the cars. The decision to do that was taken by the World Motorsport Council on the 30th of June, and it was taken unanimously, and it was taken on the basis of evidence that I think some of you have seen and a lot of more evidence that the speed of the cars is now dangerously fast. We cannot afford to continue to take this risk.
Now if we follow the procedures of the Concorde Agreement, the technical working group have two months in which to produce proposals to slow the cars. We then have to decide whether we think those proposals are adequate. If we think they are not, we can ourselves give the teams three alternative, three different proposals or packages of proposals from which they must chose one.
If, within 45 days - sorry this is a bit tedious but it's important - if within 45 days they have not chosen one of those packages, we can then impose a set of measures and those measures come into force automatically within… they must not come in before three months, but any moment after three months they come into force. That means that, if we follow the whole procedure through, and they would know… and they were unable to produce something, they would know what we were doing, third week of October and it would come into force towards the end of January.
Now of course if they produce a satisfactory proposal within the next two months, that would be quicker. I think the chance of them producing a proposal is remote because there are ten teams, all the technical directors of the teams constitute the technical working group, and those ten people have to agree by a majority of at least eight votes, so eight to one, or to eight to two, before anything can come in, it has to be an eighty per cent majority.
So what we are going to do is, in order to help them perhaps, we are going to furnish them within two weeks with a precise set of regulations covering three topics, which I will outline in a moment, which they may chose to adopt, but which they will then know that if they don't produce something, will be the measures that in all probability we will adopt - in fact more than in all probability, that we would adopt.
Now those measures which are going to be precise will cover the three main areas that cause the cars to go faster and these are, in no particular order: aerodynamics, engines and tyres.
The tyre regulation that we will suggest will drastically reduce the number of tyres available per weekend and what is being talked about at the moment is two sets of tyres, one for Friday and Saturday, and another set for qualifying and the race, with the original set as a back-up, with two types or tyres to take account of the possibility that a team couldn't work on a particular set of tyres.
The second area, the engines: in 2005, we will require engines to do two races, two weekends between rebuilds, in order to reduce the power slightly from what it is now and we feel that is as far as we can go on the engines for 2005.
In 2006 we will require them to drop the capacity of the engine from 3.0 litres to 2.4. It will be a V8, it will be more restricted than the restrictions proposed by all seven engine manufacturers. These are restrictions on dimensions and on various… centre lines of the crankshaft, things of that kind with the engine, restrictions on materials. These have already been proposed. We will go further than that but not quite as far as the ultimate version of the restrictions set out in the note I sent to the teams and which some of you have seen. But there will be very serious restrictions on what can be done to the engines. This will keep the power and the power escalation under control. It will have an incidental helpful side effect of significantly reducing the costs of working on these engines.
In addition to that, we will then have to confront the difficulty: what happens to those teams which either do not have a 2.4 V8 for 2006 because they are not aligned to a manufacturer, or even perhaps a manufacturer can't get an engine ready in time. Well what we will do there is we will reduce… we will allow them to continue to run a three litre V10 but with a rev limiter, and the rev limit will be set at a level which will ensure that the engine is less powerful - but not much less powerful - than the 2.4s which those organisations which can build them have built.
This will have the incidental benefit of allowing those teams which currently have to… which currently are perhaps rather near the back of the grid, having a significantly smaller power deficit against the cars at the front of the grid than they currently have because we would simply be able to adjust the rev limit. That is what we will do. So everybody will have a choice. You can build a 2.4 according to those regulations, do the best you can, get the most power you can, that is your engine.
Or if you can't or won't do that, you can run with a V10 but it will be one for which we set a rev limit and we will worry about the rev limit when we have more information about the power output and above all the power curve of the 2.4 V8. So that is the measure that we will be taking on the engines to reduce the performance of the cars, as I said at the beginning, for safety reasons.
The third element, the aerodynamics: there will be a significant package of aerodynamic measures already for 2005 and these will… I won't go into the detail because it's still be worked on. Charlie will explain some of it to the teams, but they will have precise detailed regulations for those aerodynamics, for the engines and also of course, the sporting rules for the tyres, available to them within the next two weeks which they may or may not adopt, but they can be reasonably sure that if they don't come up with something better themselves, then those will be the regulations we will adopt.
It may be that some of the teams will prefer simply to follow those regulations we published on the grounds that that is certain and they know what they are doing and they've got time to do everything. Others may prefer to campaign for other regulations but if they do, they are going to have to get eight out of the ten teams to agree with them, something which is not immediately easy to do.
We also will bring in a standard ECU as soon as we can. We would like to do that at the beginning of the 2.4 engine. That will not… it may not be possible. The reason for that is that although the electronics experts all agree that they could produce something which would keep the… give us the assurance that there was no cheating, no traction control, nothing of that kind. In truth, I think it's almost impossible to convince the public and or even the press, to convince you, that nobody is doing something they shouldn't and to convince the wider public is not possible. We've always said that unless we can be absolutely certain we can demonstrate to the public beyond any doubt there is no cheating, we don't go along with the system. Because we've learned the lesson last time when we had no traction control, constantly the rumours in the paddock were that there was traction control, and then of course in the event it turned out that there wasn't. When we opened up the freedom to the teams, none of the systems worked, so what chance that they were working when they were illegal if they wouldn't work when they were legal? But of course everybody thought they were. It made a bad atmosphere in the paddock and we don't want that happening again.
But the standard ECU is something for the future, it is not part of the package of safety measures which I have just outlined. So that, briefly in outline, is what we're going to do. There are certain other elements to do with the engines. For example, it is our intention also to keep the power under control in 2006, to require the engines to use bio-fuels, that's to say fuels that are carbon neutral and various other details of that kind, but nevertheless significant in all of these measure to keep the power under control.
Final point on the engines is that you may find some people saying: shouldn't interfere with the engines, it should all be the aerodynamics. Well there have been eight meetings of the technical working group over the last two years in which they've repeatedly said… in which each time they've said, we need to keep the power down, the only way we can keep the car performance under control is to reduce the power and so this we are now going to do. We have to do it, it's our duty to do it, it's our duty to act before somebody gets seriously hurt or killed. And at the moment, the risks, in our opinion, are entirely unacceptably high.
So that was the third point; sorry it was rather long, about the engines.
Fourth point: about me. As you all know, I'm going to step down in October. There is nothing particularly significant about this. I haven't got some amazing new job lined up and happily, as far as I know, I'm perfectly healthy.
It's just that I've got to the point now where I no longer find it interesting or satisfying to sit in long meetings, particularly with the Formula One teams and the World Rally Championship teams, where people often agree things and then they go away after the meeting and change their mind completely. It means you've wasted a day. Sometimes one says to oneself, isn't it actually probably more fun to sit on the beach with an interesting book than to sit here having these discussions?
And some of the discussions are really tedious. I won't bore you with endless accounts but to give you one example. There's one Formula One team principal - I won't embarrass anybody by giving a name - but let's just say that he's not perhaps the sharpest knife in the box, and he brings with him a manager, a manager person who comes with him to give him a little bit of weight. And the manager person is a detail man. The problem is it's always the wrong detail, so you have these interminable discussions about completely irrelevant minutiae when you're trying to get on with something serious.
At a certain point, that begins to pall particularly if you're really doing it because it interests you. It's not a paid job, it's a job that's done out of interest and this repeats itself to some extent. It's not as bad in the rallies, it repeats itself there. And then you get to the stage where you've really had enough of that and so you think, well, maybe the time has come to hand over to somebody else, or for somebody else to take the job. Above all, you shouldn't stay in a job if it doesn't really fascinate you, that is as important as the FIA. And it is a very important job, it's become very important.
From my own point of view, I've achieved within the job everything really I've set out to achieve, and I'm very grateful to the people who have helped me doing that, and to a large extent, that's also been the press, I have to say that, and I'm grateful for this.
The thing is that - just to give you a few little examples - for 55 years, people have been trying to unite the FIA and the AIT. The AIT is a world motoring body that was always a sort of rival to the FIA. That has now been achieved.
We have become significant players in Brussels. We have a forum that is a very significant political body to do with everyday road cars. We have a foundation with an endowment of over $300m thanks to Bernie for the Formula One money. The money from that gets spent half on motor sport safety, half on road safety generally. That is a very satisfying thing, seeing that happen.
On the road safety, it's had a huge effect, it has become a world organisation and the effect it's had in motor sport is less obvious but nevertheless it's there and it's very significant. In addition to that, with the support of the FIA, I was able to start and preside over the Euro NCap organisation for eight years. I stepped down from that a few weeks ago because I thought the time had come for someone else to have it. I've also been able to preside for three years over IRTICO - Intelligent Transport Systems Europe - which brings together all the governments and attempts to use electronics to improve mobility and safety on the roads.
All of these things have been very satisfying, very satisfactory. You really have a sense that things have moved, you've achieved something but all that is really left now and unless I wanted to go on into my late sixties, seventies and so on, like some people do in these international federations but I feel is wrong, unless I want to do that, if I was going to step down in 2005, which would be natural thing to do, all really I've got is another year of fairly routine, mundane things.
I've got one final thing I have to do and this is push through these changes to Formula One which I've just explained. That process will be set in motion, as I've already mentioned, next Tuesday and once set in motion, and once the rules are set down, it will all simply follow automatically, it will all just happen, for all practical purposes, it's done.
So I feel my task is done and I feel, as I say, a sense of satisfaction. I'm very grateful to everybody who's helped. As I say, I'm very grateful to the press for everything they've done and for the support I've had from many of you and criticism from time to time, often justified, I say often justified.
But I think the time has come. And one final element on that is that within the FIA I've had a quite extraordinary level of and I'm very grateful to them for it, a huge number of people saying 'don't go, it's fine, please just stay on.' But I think it's exactly at that moment that you should go. It's when they start saying 'maybe it's about time the old boy went' which they have in other organisations, then it's already too late. It's the moment and I've seized it. So thank you very much for listening. I'm sorry that was so long. Anybody wants to ask a question, I'll be delighted (to answer it).