Chris Balfe's piece on the Minardi purchase of tons of stuff from the Arrows auction throws up a number of points.

Chris was at Minardi for a four-hour exclusive interview with Paul Stoddart. This will be appearing on pitpass in instalments. I've heard a tiny part of it and can't wait to read the lot. If it is all passed by the lawyers it is going to be the most explosive F1 article in twenty years.

This raises questions in itself. Why are there so few honest interviews? Try looking at the groups which own print magazines and see what else the group does. The group may, for example, organise events in conjunction with a particular team. Its PR section may actually work for a team.

The reason why Chris was granted the interview is because pitpass is known to be honest and independent. Who else had the real story of Minardi at the Arrows auction? And that despite the fact that pitpass had been giving Stoddart a hard time. It was Chris who pointed out that Aussies invented the term 'whinging Pom' to describe British immigrants, yet here was someone from Oz who seemed to do little else but whinge, whine and generally bemoan his unhappy lot as a multimillionaire F1 team owner.

pitpass got the story because pitpass has the attention of the Formula One community. We know that by the number of times that PR people complain about us. They cannot fault the factual content of our stories, it's just that our stories are not the stories the PR crowd want you to hear.

Chris was given the first look at what Minardi bought at the Arrows auction and his reaction was what a lot of waste there is in Formula One. Minardi has bought millions of pounds worth of surplus stuff, plus five Arrows F1 cars. Chris was not told how much a sponsor of Minardi paid for the motor racing bargain of he decade, but I personally believe it was $700,000.

Among the treasure trove was enough carbon composite to see Minardi through next year. There was $3 million-worth of brake parts. There were the nuts and bolts, literally. Formula One uses aerospace specification nuts and bolts and you cannot buy such from your local hardware store. There were the 14 exhaust systems when Minardi has been struggling along on five.

Why did Arrows need so many surplus spares? The mainstream motor industry long ago realised that the most efficient way to build cars is to have the components arrive on the day that they are due to be used.

A Formula One exhaust system takes time to manufacture so it's as well to have some in reserve, but 14 spares seems a little excessive for a team that spent most of last year trying to survive. I have no idea what an exhaust system costs to make, but last year Williams used special lightweight exhaust systems which were used for qualifying and then scrapped. They are reputed to have cost £16,500 each.

Tom Walkinshaw spent a long time building the TWR Group into one of the world's most important servers to the automotive industry. TWR could do anything, from designing a Formula One engine from scratch to converting a Renault Clio into a mid-engined supercar.

I bet that the branch of TWR in charge of designing the Clio V6 was run as a tight ship as was every other sub-division. Of course it was, because those parts of TWR were operating in the real world. They were supplying a service and the only way to make a profit is to be efficient. By contrast, Formula One operates from Fantasy Island.

Want to know why Reynard was successful as a company for nearly twenty years? The answer is Rick Gorne, Adrian Reynard's right hand man for most of that time. Rick was the first person in motor racing to analyse the sport as a business. He worked out that a racing car is likely to be involved in some kind of accident once in eight starts so he built Reynard on its supply of spares.