Philthy82 wrote:
Unfortunately Irvine was a lazy git and brought absolutely nothing to Jaguar other than his name. Webber did far more to grow that team and give it some confidence.
That's half true. Irvine's attitude wasn't very good but Jaguar nee Ford were the reason why the team were abysmal, not the drivers or the engineers or the designers. It was all Ford board room staff. Things didn't change for the better because Irvine left and Webber joined, it was due to the fact that the right people were allowed to do the right things.
Autosport.com wrote:
Why Jaguar was doomed to fail in F1
By Gary Anderson Published on Tuesday August 9th 2016
I found out that the Stewart team, where I was technical director, had been bought out by Ford and would be rebranded for 2000 before the Canadian Grand Prix in June 1999.
I was in California, because we used the Swift windtunnel, and I got a call from Jackie Stewart's secretary to set up a meeting in Detroit on the way to Montreal. I went there and there was a dinner suit, shirt, shoes all ready for me in my hotel room. The meeting was with Jackie, Helen [Jackie's wife], Edsel Ford II, and me - that's when I found out the company had been sold.
It seemed like a very good move, and it alleviated a lot of financial pressures. Although Stewart was getting some good results and did win a race late in 1999 at the Nurburgring with Johnny Herbert, we were not a big team and didn't have endless budgets. By becoming a works team, that was going to let it build.
The decision to sell was the right one, but Ford ownership was of no great use to us, even though the potential was there. The idea of using the Jaguar brand was a very good one, the financial support was there, but ultimately it didn't work. It wasn't because of the team itself, but because of the management style.
The problem was the Ford people believed they could come in and reinvent the wheel, rather than building on what was there. We gave them some projects to get on with - for example the rollover-bar structure.
The idea was to come up with something that met the crash test requirement but was lighter. Because it's the highest part of the car, weight is significant because of its impact on the centre of gravity.
Ford did come up with a super-light solution - great. But unfortunately it never got anywhere near passing the crash test. This kind of thing happened all the time, no matter in what area.
There were a couple of decent guys at Ford who knew how to do things, but they just got steamrollered by the rest of them.
The 2000 car, the Jaguar R1, was a decent car. That might seem a strange thing to say given that we only scored four points - three for Eddie Irvine's fourth place at Monaco and one for his sixth in Malaysia - but it was.
It had a few basic problems, but those were not able to be fixed because of the way the Ford system worked.
One of the head honchos of the Ford Motor Company sat in one of our first engineering meetings after they had taken over and told us all, 'Do it our way, or we will find someone else who will' - which tells you everything you need to know.
The R1 was a development of the previous year's Stewart. It had some novel systems in terms of the suspension that helped us to reduce the centre of gravity, get the top of the gearbox lower and that helped aerodynamically as well. But there were two main errors - one mechanical and one aerodynamic.
Ford brought in someone who did analytical research for Ford Motor Company who went through all of the parameters that could influence things - ambient temperature, ride height, etc, lots of information. He would hit the button in the programme and it was supposed to spit out the result. No matter if it didn't relate to the real world, it was considered gospel.
This slowed progress a lot and when we did want to change something, there was enormous lag in the system. You can waste two months thinking about something when you're producing a road car, but when you have races every couple of weeks in F1, you can't. That wasn't a fault unique to Ford, as other car manufacturers like Toyota made similar mistakes.
They also made it difficult for me to do my job as technical director. I was warned off getting involved day-to-day and told to concentrate on managing. Well, we already had technical managers and I'm a hands-on person, whose strength is to think about things and the potential solutions. But I wasn't allowed to do that. I always had to go through those responsible for set areas and if they didn't see what I saw, nothing would change.
For example, we had a gearbox problem during the season. Eddie had no problems, but Johnny would regularly break gears downshifting. This went on race after race and the only response I got was that the gears were clearly too flimsy. Well, if they worked for Eddie, that clearly wasn't the real problem.
We went to Monza and did a day's testing with Eddie and there was no problem. Johnny was driving for the next couple of days and on day one twice broke gears downshifting for the first chicane.
The chief mechanic called me and I asked him to leave the gearbox unassembled so I could have a look as I was taking some parts down to test on the final day. We weren't meant to do this, but what the hell - the season was ebbing away on us.
It took 10 minutes to work out a simple fix by drilling a 3mm hole through something to allow a hydraulic plunger to breathe. Suddenly, Johnny could downshift - no problem. We had that issue from early in the season, but the Ford system didn't allow us to fix it until September.
The aerodynamic problem with the diffuser stalling appeared as early as the second race of the year in Brazil. If you look back at the articles in Autosport from pre-season testing, you'll see Johnny and Eddie were talking about fighting for the championship. This diffuser situation was a big problem, but it only started to highlight itself when we went to hotter climates.
I was confident that the diffuser was stalling at low rideheight, which is normal, but then not reattaching the airflow when the rideheight increased. It had all the traits of that sort of problem, but identifying and rectifying it would take company commitment.
The Ford way was that we had a progress meeting once a month, and if I suggested a new diffuser because I had a 'gut feel' it would go down like a lead balloon. Everything needed engineering facts.
Our own aerodynamics department was not as sure as I was because all the windtunnel data said that it was fine, but we kept having this problem and I was pretty confident what it was. But I was warned off getting involved with it.
I went to the Swift windtunnel, which we were using for a test, and it was quickly clear that the way the software ran the windtunnel wasn't fit for our purposes of trying to trace the hysteresis of a stalling diffuser.
To work out the hysteresis - the gap between the physical conditions changing and the effect of that change - you would run the car down to the diffuser stall point then raise it half a millimetre at a time and see how quickly the airflow reattached. But the way the windtunnel worked, it always returned to the reference rideheight that is much higher before going to the new rideheight, so you weren't getting an accurate reading.
Eventually we did an aero test up in Yorkshire. We attached some wool tufts to the diffuser and with a high-speed camera inserted up the R1's rear end watched them drop.
We had a hydraulic rear suspension unit so we could adjust the rideheight as required, and at the test and we saw the stall was there and it took a much greater increase in rear rideheight than was expected before it reattached. This meant - as I had believed for months - that as soon as you hit the brake pedal, you had no rear downforce.
We used bodyfiller to make some inserts to modify it and it solved the problem ahead of the last two races of the year in Japan and Malaysia. Bearing in mind we'd effectively lost all of our set-up work and all the development progress we should have made had the diffuser problem been picked up, Eddie showed that the car could be competitive with seventh on the grid for both races.
At the previous race at Indianapolis, we'd qualified 2.467% off the pace, but at Suzuka we were 1.121% and at Sepang 1.334% - so the difference was clear. And it shows that the claim the car was a good one has some basis!
The issues with the management caused problems in so many areas. Late in the '99 season with Stewart we tested used engine oil to cool the gearbox and that ran perfectly. We were working with Texaco and they made a special additive to make it work better and use the overspill of the engine oil pumps to lubricate the gearbox, saving weight and the power required to run another pump.
In 2000 it all ran fine but at the first race in Australia Cosworth fitted a much finer filter system on the return oil from the gearbox. Basically the oil couldn't get through it - I had to shove a screwdriver through the filter to make it work. But Ford had its relationship with Cosworth and the Cosworth people were considered gods who could do no wrong. Cosworth was a good engine builder, but it wasn't perfect.
An example of the Ford management was at the final round in Malaysia after one of the practice sessions. Neil Ressler, the team chairman, came into the meeting and asked why Eddie's car was 5km/h slower on the straights. One of our engineers said the aero was the same so it must be the engine, and Neil went berserk.
By this time in the season I'd had enough. We had a lot of good people and they were being destroyed. I took Neil to one side and asked him to keep out of things because we had a lot of work to do to make up for the lost time and had a chance to do well. I knew my days were numbered then and it was no surprise when I was subsequently told that my services were no longer required.
Motivation comes from the people above you and if you don't have that, there's no hope. I'm not an Adrian Newey or a Ross Brawn, but if you can motivate me I'll do a decent job. If I'd been able to do that, then I'm sure we'd have won races and maybe even been able to fight for championships.
When I heard a few days later that Steve Nichols was taking over, I realised they had no idea what they were doing because I had worked with him for a short time at Jordan and he definitely wasn't the right person for the job. I remember Eddie Irvine calling me in 2001 and telling me that you needed two steering wheels to deal with the car because it was so unpredictable - one to steer the front axle and one the back!
Adrian did almost go to Jaguar under Bobby Rahal, and for all his successes I'd say the brightest thing he ever did was not join the team until it was under Red Bull ownership a few years later. Obviously it would have been a little different, as they would probably have let him do what he wanted, but the way Ford system worked I can't see the team ever having been able to achieve success.
To give Jaguar credit, from the outside I could see that they were making some progress and improved in their final season in 2004, but there were still too many mistakes.
I'm happy with what I did there and was pleased to see the team later get the success it deserved after Red Bull took over. If Jaguar had started doing very well after I left, I'd have to look at what I did wrong, but it wasn't exactly a success story so, looking back, all I can say is that I was quite happy not to be involved after 2000.
It's a shame because with Ford's financial backing and with an upper-management restructure everything could have been put in place to give a decent level of success. Jaguar would have been a very popular team in F1 with a lot of fans behind it.
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