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FIA Friday Press Conference-Japan Grand Prix

Friday’s press conference was held before the decision to delay qualifying until Sunday morning. Present on the panel were team principals David Richards (BAR), Peter Sauber (Sauber), Paul Stoddart (Minardi) and Tsutomu Tomita (Toyota).

Q: Just a general question to all of you, it is a topic at the moment. The typhoon has been up rated to a super typhoon. What preparations are you making for tomorrow and possibly for Sunday? How it will affect qualifying? How you would like to see qualifying re-scheduled if tomorrow is cancelled and how prepared you are to deal with an extreme weather situation as we are facing at the moment?

David Richards: I think the first thing is, I notice everyone is stocking up with sandwiches and Alpen bars and booking the Log Cabin for lunch tomorrow! Clearly it is an unfortunate situation, more thinking of the fans actually out there, the poor people that have actually sat in the grandstands today and didn’t see much action, and of course I suspect that if things carry on the way they are, probably tomorrow will be completely cancelled so it’s a bit concerning. It leads on to qualifying of course and what we do for qualifying is the next issue. It’s all very well coming up with random ideas but it’s got to be fair for everybody and it is a fairly decisive point in the championship for many teams, so we can’t have anything that is unfairly biased towards anyone. I suspect there are three solutions. I think the first solution is to cram both qualifying sessions into Sunday morning, which hopefully the organisers can accommodate. If they can’t then clearly one qualifying session would have to be based on perhaps the last result but in reverse order, as if it were the second session, so you would start with the race result and the winner of the last race would go last. Alternatively a grid position based on the finishing position of the last race might be the final solution to that, but I would suspect one of those would be fairest.

Paul Stoddart: I think firstly again, for the fans, they are the biggest losers out of this. The teams will survive I’m sure. We will batten down the hatches and make the most of tomorrow if we are running and if we’re not running, then, as David said, Sunday will become a bit of a lottery. I am sure we will squabble over what the final outcome is going to be as to whether or not we go for reverse grid, we go for championship order, we go for last race or, indeed, we take Bernie’s idea and draw lots out of a hat, but one way or another we will come up for a grid for Sunday’s race and lets hope the aftermath of the typhoon doesn’t interfere with Sunday’s race because I think it’s bad enough if we don’t have qualifying tomorrow but if we also have to have a very poor or indeed an aborted race, I think that would be even worse for the fans.

Peter Sauber: There are a lot of possibilities. I think if we started to think about it immediately then two weeks later we would have a solution. (Laughter)

Paul Stoddart: Two years, Peter!

Q: Tomita-san, perhaps you have more experience of these conditions in Japan. Will a typhoon last for several days or will it be over by Sunday? Will it be safe to drive on Sunday?

Tsutomu Tomita: My opinion is quite similar to David’s

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