On Monday Jordan and BAR stopped off on the way to Melbourne to attend the official launch of the Honda RA001E engine.
As part of the day the team principals and drivers attended a press conference, the Jordan part of which is published below.
What are your hopes for the year?
HHF: We need to have a very good season. I am sure it is going to be very difficult but I am very
positive.
JT: It would be nice to get points in Melbourne, but it will be tough. We have had no chance to
compare where we really are, so I'm looking forward to the first race. This will be a very important season for us with the new 'works' engine support from Honda, so we will do our best. They have been working very hard all winter and everything is looking positive.
EJ: This year has to be better than last year, which was a big disappointment for Jordan and our
worst in the last 5 or 6 years, but we did learn a lot. The association between Honda and Jordan makes a massive jump for us and I am confident that we can make a huge improvement on 2000. But it is difficult as you never know quite what your potential is until it comes to Saturday in Melbourne, so it's exciting but also quite stressful. We are optimistic, we've done a lot of work and we are certainly more reliable than last year, which was our big problem. So fingers crossed we'll be OK for Melbourne.
What are your impressions about the new Honda RA001E engine?
HHF: This is my first year driving for Honda and I expect that we will have a very competitive year.
Also for Jordan, this is the first time that we have a 'works' engine so we are looking forward to working closely with Honda and creating more development in the year.
JT: For us it is a new adventure with Honda and a good step forward. The engine is smaller,
lighter and more powerful compared to last year. Everything looks very good for us at the moment. But we are fighting with Ferrari and McLaren so we have to work really hard all
through the season and try to improve the performance of the car and the performance of the engine if we really want to reach the top. We know that is not going to be easy, but I think it is important we are all committed to reaching the top.
Eddie, this is your first year with Honda. How have you found the team?
EJ: This is the first time we have enjoyed an official manufacturer relationship, but we do know some of the people from years before. We are seeing the same very fine quality and attention to detail that we saw in previous years. What is nice about our current situation is that when we request or ask for information about ideas or programmes, there is an immediate reaction.
You get the impression that there is a very clear demand for attention to detail and for performance. Success to strive to get the best engineering solution as quickly as possible
and that is what is required in F1. The sport has moved into such a high technological centre that I believe the relationship between Jordan and Honda is a big advantage. There's a great
history with Honda and they are used to winning; the biggest problem for us perhaps is to win as quickly as we can and give you and the guys at Honda the return on their investment.
Do the drivers have a message for their fans, especially those in Japan?
HHF: Yes, thank you very much for the support I have got from some Japanese fans, and I would
like to give it as a return of having good races this year and together with Honda we'll have also a lot of Japanese influence, so hopefully we'll find a reason to celebrate this year.
JT: I already have a lot of Japanese fans but obviously this year with Honda probably I will have a
lot more. I just want to say that they need to keep close with us because this year we're going to have a very tough season, but hopefully we're going to celebrate together, fight to win races, fight to score points, and fight to have an exciting season.
Who are your main rivals this year?
EJ: There's possibly too much attention paid to the rivalry between the two teams (Jordan and BAR), but BAR are not our enemy. All the teams are our enemy including BAR and we hope to try and beat them all. We have to be fairly realistic about this. We've been in it a bit longer than BAR, and we've been one of the few teams, we're the only team currently running outside McLaren and Ferrari that have won in the last three or four years. That's given us some advantage psychologically in terms of being able to understand what's needed to win in Formula 1 as a team.
The positive side, and we must think about the positive side, is that there will be two teams with a huge amount of knowledge going back to Honda to make everything work better, in their case on the chassis side and on the engine side with us, combined together, and I think if we are really professional about it we can try to put two things aside.
We are enemies on the track but to what we have in terms of equipment going to the track we should work in every way possible to help ourselves, to help our joint partners in Honda and that will be my target. But on the track it's a different story, we are out to destroy everybody if we can, it doesn't matter who they are and I don't even want to think about the names of the teams.
Of course everybody talks about McLaren and Ferrari, but please believe me that the world has changed in Formula 1 since the major manufacturers have come in, so I think you're going to see a much closer Championship in every respect all through the grid and there'll be lots of surprises. It's just very important for Jordan, and I presume the same applies to BAR, that we give the best account of ourselves, drag ourselves back up.
You know we finished third the year before last but we had a very bad time last year, so nothing is taken for granted these days, but I'm really quite optimistic for this season, we'll just have to wait to see.
Get your own Free Home Page