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Hungary GP: Friday Press Conference

NEWS STORY
27/07/2012

Friday's press conference with Andrew Green (Force India), Luiz Perez Sala (HRT), Remi Taffin (Renault Sport F1), Martin Whitmarsh (McLaren) and Toto Wolff (Williams).

Andrew, if I can start with you. First of all, who does Force India see as its rivals and where do you hope to be at the end of the season? What position? What are you targets?
Andrew Green: Ultimately, everybody on the track is our rival. At the moment we would be targeting sixth position, that would be a realistic target for us. It's going to be difficult. The cars in front of us are all very, very competitive. So it's going to be a big ask and we'll have to dig deep, as we always do, and we'll be pushing like crazy right until the end. That'll be the plan and we'll see where we finishing. So far we're in a position where we're better than we were last year with respect to points and we're reasonably happy with that. If every we score more and more points then ultimately we're going to go up, so happy with that. But there are just some teams in front of us who have scored some big results and got on the podium and that's put us behind them. It's just a matter of chipping away at them and hopefully by the time we get to the end we'll be just in front. That'll be the plan.

What about developments? What sort of developments can you envisage coming through?
AG: It's a tricky time. We brought our last big development to Silverstone. We didn't really get a chance to evaluate it in the wet conditions. Beyond that it's about optimising what we have and getting to know what we have and getting it to run at its peak. Development now really is turning to next year. For a team of our size we can't afford to develop a car much beyond this point in the season. It's really a case of trying to optimise what we have.

That was going to be the next question, when does development shift to next year?
AG: It started a while ago.

So most thoughts from the design team are on that?
AG: From about this time, yes, it has switched over.

Remi, first of all tell us about your role within Renault F1?
Remi Taffin: Basically, I'm just working on the track as Head of Operations, so whatever we deal with on engines on track I'm responsible for. Basically we have four teams we supply engines to, as you know, and I will make sure through a race weekend that we've got let's say a crossover in between these teams to make sure the Renault engines are well used in any car but trying to keep the confidentiality that we must have.

Obviously the great subject here is all about mapping. Can you explain to us what that means and when you change that how big a change is that? And how it is done.
RT: We're not talking about big changes. We're talking about an ongoing process, which is obviously race after race you try to optimise your package and engine maps are part of that and that's what we've been trying to do since the beginning of the year. When you talk about engine maps it's something that is done by everyone in the pitlane. So that's not something unusual.

When we talking about it, we're talking about software… someone has referred to it as a 'gizmo'. Can we explain that?
RT: Let's take the example of the engine map we've been talking about. It's basically what the engine is able to produce as torque during the weekend, for example here. And that's where is the bulk of the part to play with in Renault engines. That's what shape… what we have got as torque in the car.

And when it comes to Red Bull - how much of a change in performance would that have been, that was caused by that change.
RT: It's very difficult to quantify, but let's have, say, a scale: we're talking about hundredths and not at all about seconds or tenths. We all know that every bit on the car we're going to be working [on it] to get the hundredth out, so that's part of the job.

Martin, obviously you've had an update recently but how much has that been affected by the weather. We've had a wet Silverstone, a wet Hockenheim and now we have we weather here. How much has development been affected?
Martin Whitmarsh: Well, it's certainly difficult now that we don't test. If you bring a whole package of upgrades to the car, on Friday morning P1 typically we have our only test session and if it's wet then it rather handicaps that test. It's been difficult. I think we've made some progress and we will continue to do so. We had a reasonably big package of upgrades in Germany and we have a few bits and pieces here as well. You'll do what you can. We've had a remarkable run of run of rain in the practice sessions so far this year. It would be nice to get some steady, dry conditions where the engineers can work more easily. But it's the same for everyone. Everyone, to varying degrees, is trying to develop and improve the car and that's part of the challenge. Sometimes you've got a great data set and you can go forward with confidence and other times you have to make a decision on a limited data set and in some ways that's more interesting. The engineers don't like it but it's more interesting when you have to take a bit of a flyer.

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