Q: A question to all of you to start off with about the regulations for 2006, which I believe that you're going to discuss at a meeting on Monday week, where it's being finalised? I don't know what the situation is. Have those regulations been agreed on, do you agree with them because we were told you all agreed on them, and what's the situation with that meeting.
Tony Purnell: Certainly I'm not under the impression that the regulations have been agreed - far from it. It's a fact-finding exercise at the moment. From our point of view, we're just hoping that moves to contain the expense of Formula One and get it back into something that meets the sort of market forces will be achieved. I think that's the mood of everybody. I hope we're successful in finding that formula.
Paul Stoddart: I certainly don't think anything's been agreed. The Monaco meeting was simply a fact-finding mission. Perhaps it was played up a little bit more than that after the meeting, but I certainly don't feel we went away from there agreeing anything. What worries me a little bit is we haven't seen an agenda, or I certainly haven't seen an agenda, for Monday week's meeting, and since it is so important I would have liked to have seen one by now. But we've got to try, as Tony says, to contain the costs and teams like Eddie and I are very interested to see just where this goes.
Eddie Jordan: Certainly nothing has been agreed. There was a meeting in Monaco where Max told us the things he would like to see. Some were possible and (he) look(ed) for an answer back from the teams, we've done that, we did that almost immediately. So the position of Jordan is, within reason, clear on certain aspects and there were some things that he said that were not negotiable but we'll have to wait and see what the agenda's like when we receive it.
Q: Can I change the question slightly for David Richards and Ron Dennis? What are the contentious issues in those suggestions and are you worried the regulations may be railroaded through? What don't you agree with?
David Richards: I think the fact of the matter is that what has been put to us is a set of regulations for 2008, at the end of the current Concorde Agreement, and there can be no argument about that. It's within the FIA's remit to present regulations that they are going to run the championship with from 2008 onwards and it's up to us to decide whether we are going to enter or not. As to whether any of those regulations can be brought forward or there's any benefit to bring them forward, that's a further debate, but I don't see that's going to happen overnight.
Ron Dennis: First of all, I echo pretty much everything that everybody else has said. The fact is that it was a constructive meeting that took place in Monaco to discuss changes. It wasn't just a cost-driven discussion - we are very keen to improve the spectacle of Grand Prix racing. There are other issues – the number of races, technical and commercial issues – that were discussed. But the format both there and in future meetings shouldn't be a public format. I'm always mystified coming to an FIA press conference and to be asked questions that are by an FIA representative which are contentious questions. We are looking for a harmonious internal set of discussions which leads to a set of regulations or a commercial agreement that we are unified behind. So I am always mystified why contentious questions are asked. For example, you asked the question '2006 regulations'. There are no regulations that are going to change in 2006 unless it's by way of unanimous agreement between the parties that are signatories to the Concorde Agreement. That means the teams, the governing body and the commercial rights holder. It's a simple fact and, for once, I think we are in harmony, as teams. We want to make things better, we want to make it a better spectacle, we want to reduce costs and we are all committed to that. But it's never achieved in a public forum.
Q: Tony, what is needed at Jaguar to turn it around? They seem to have slipped back a little?
TP: That's fair. We're thoroughly disappointed with the season. We started with a very nice quick car and we've been let down by a lot of small mistakes. We have a limited resource and we put the effort into what we thought was important with the money we had and I think we've been quite successful there. But in Formula One you've got to be good at everything, you can't make any mistakes anywhere, and it's a no prisoners game. The areas that we haven't been so strong on have hurt us very badly. I'm sort of 50-50 with it because when we were designing the car, if anybody had mentioned what sort of lap times it's capable of nine months ago we would have shaken our heads and said ‘just now way, we're not going to make a car that good.' But the standard this year is fabulous and fantastic lap times compared to last year are ordinary I'm afraid. So it's a tough game and we have to find all those little improvements. I have to say that it's one of the problems when you've got an adequate budget but not an excess because money can mask mistakes. It's very easy to buy your way out of mistakes. We can't do that. We've got to get everything right and if we don't we're punished. But that's the game we're in, so no complaints.
Q: Paul, I've seen quoted that you reckon that you're worse off than you have been for many years, but you've probably got a better budget this year. How does that work out?
PS: Two reasons. One, as Tony just touched on, is that there are no bad cars, there are no bad chassis, there are no bad engines and there are no bad drivers and, simply put, we've taken two seconds a lap out of most of the tracks that we've visited this year and it's not enough. We're just getting left behind and we're being outspent enormously, which we accept. We accept our budget is the smallest in Formula One but it's starting to always show and I think if you add that to the fact that we've had stable technical regulations now for several years in a row you're seeing the by-product of that, which is ultra-reliability. In the main, most of the teams now will go through a race weekend with very little problems. We see, consistently, 15, 16, 17 cars finishing races, which would have been unheard of a few years ago. We're just being outspent and that's our problem.
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