Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Tony Fernandes is learning what most of us around racing already know, changes to rules cost money. They cost the car builder and the track owner money, everyone except those making the rules. I noticed this when running motorcycle GP's. I would go to meetings of the Road Racing Commission of the FIM, along with sponsors, teams and manufacturers and other track owners, and be forced to listen in silence while 16 men with not a dime invested between them discuss changes to rules. I well remember one poor soul from Yugoslavia, as it was then, who had made all the upgrades to his track as requested, and then was not given a race! He just about cut his wrists on the conference table.

The FIA and FIM keep going on about cutting costs, and then proceed to make the teams redesign the cars or motorcycles each year. And not just a little. We go from movable front wings to movable back wings next year, or has that been dropped? It is hard to keep up, let alone try and design a car for next year. The 125cc class disappears, so what happens to all those machines? Are they now so much junk?

Korea is a running sore now for Bernie, and it seems our friend Mr. Tilke is getting some flak about the lateness in completion. To put the record straight I met Peter Wahl, Managing Director for Tilke, at the Forum in New York back in April, and he said then that the Koreans only wanted them to design the track, the Koreans would build it themselves. Now it seems the Koreans are pleading that they had not built an F1 track before so should be excused for being late! I presume they knew before they started that they had not done this before. When I did Adelaide I had not done it before either, but we still got it done. I know what they mean though, it is more complicated now, but there are also people available now that know how to do it, so there is no excuse if you choose to ignore them. As I try and tell potential clients, it costs just as much to build it wrong as build it correctly, the only difference is the fee for someone like me, and that is peanuts in the scheme of things. The cost of rebuilding it, or not completing it is enormous, as the Koreans are about to find out.

If you want to see the next disaster go on the ESPNF1 web site and look at the photos of the Indian track for next years GP. They are already complaining that the weather is delaying them. When I built Eastern Creek there was a famous photo of the Minister for Sport and I under an umbrella standing in a lake it was raining so much. That was January, and we ran the first race in July. It was not pretty, but by September we ran a test for GP teams following the Oz GP at the Island. You can either get it done or you can't.