Willis "disappointed" with Hispania car New Hispania Racing technical chief Geoff Willis has said that he was "expecting better" from the team's first ever Formula One car, saying that the team's heavily disrupted pre-season has "compromised" the quality of the design.
The Hispania team, formerly known as Campos Meta, had a chaotic pre-season of financial issues, and very nearly didn't make the grid at the start of the season without a last-minute buyout.
Although their car was designed by the Dallara company, and as such the preparation shouldn't have suffered despite the team's in-house worries, the Italian manufacturer is believed to have had to halt development of the car on more than one occasion because of question marks over the financing of the project.
And Willis, for former Red Bull technical director who has been brought in by new team owner Jose Ramon Carabante as a 'technical consultant', says that the design of the car, which was untested before the start of the season, is well behind the rest of the field.
Willis admits that the pre-season disruption didn't help, but also slammed the Dallara design for not having the right "level of engineering".
"Frankly I'm disappointed. I was expecting better," Willis rumbled to Autosport in Malaysia.
"There a lot of reasons why this design has been compromised, not least because the programme was stop and started, stop and started. So there's quite a lot of corners that were cut in the last few weeks to get to Bahrain.
"But fundamentally I'm disappointed at the level of engineering in the car and I don't think it reflects current F1 practise by quite some margin."
He added that: "Now you put that down to time, some of it down to experience, some of it down to finance, but I think overall, even allowing for those things, I'm disappointed with what I see."
Willis explained that his main issues were with the quality of the design, given that he had expected the car to be behind the rest of the field aerodynamically anyway.
"I'm less worried about the overall performance, because the aero programme was stopped quite some while ago, and it was a relatively small aero programme," he explained, "But it's probably the same level of aero programme to the Lotus and the car is clearly not as quick as the Lotus.
"And I'm thinking just of the built quality, the design quality, the refinement of the design. I think it's missing a lot of tricks that would be taken for granted by anybody in the pitlane now."
He added that he was not interested in continuing to work with the team if they don't show signs of improvement before the end of the 2010 season.
"I'm not particularly interested in staying with a car that's at the back of the grid," Willis muttered, ignoring his time at Red Bull when he said that, "I'm interested in making cars go faster and manage the whole thing.
"I don't mind whether you are trying to win the championship from the front of the grid or if you are trying to get better from the back of the grid, but I'm just keen to make sure we've got a programme with enough funding to make it an interesting challenge, and that's something that we need to sort out."
quite frank comments
http://www.patronise...th-hispania-car
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