This interview was carried out at the BAR 005 launch in Barcelona in early 2003 as part of a group interview.

Dave Richards Group Interview

CS: Restructure
DR: What you see today is a long, long way from what I inherited had 12 months ago. Superficially people look at teams and see individuals, they see the drivers the public front of the team, they see the team principals, they see the team engineers. The teams made up in our case of 360 people or more, what happened last year was people looked at the slimming down of our organisation and I take no great pride in the fact that we were the first to take these decisions and move on this, but it was all about restructuring and refocusing the organisation into an effective group of people, for the task in hand it wasn’t about cutting costs or save money, I want an organisation that was effective, when I got there I found we had an organisation that had never really understood itself, it turned up and said “were here to win races”, it was a lovely dream but didn’t know how to do it. It was my job to put in the management structure, the processes, the methodology behind doing that, we did that first off by slimming down the organisation, we put in some key member of the team and we found some great talent within the team that wasn’t being exploited and from that base we built in the cultural values for the team and that’s the process that’s ongoing, it never stops. But, unless you have the identity and belief in yourself, that real set of values that says who you are and what you stand for, then you don’t have anything to build on as a personality to the outside world and that thats process were going through at the moment

CS: Relationship with Honda
DR: It was one of the key things I challenged before I took this on, I wanted to know the commitment of BAT and go to Japan and understand whether Honda would back me exclusively, those two elements are the cornerstone to this business.

Q: Objectives
DR: Firstly We need to put it in perspective it going to be a very challenging year, where we are putting a new group of people together, a new structure, a totally new car and I mean totally new nuts and bolts the whole lot and the relationship with Honda still developing. If you look at all those things, than our task must be to challenge to the top three teams, I thing to do that we must regularly qualify in the top10 and if we do that we should appear on the podium and we should score points on a regular basis. Iif I look back at this season and history records that this was the year BAR finally came of age and challenged the establishment, I would be very happy.