F2 boss answers new-car criticism

The new Formula 2 car has produced exciting racing at the start of this year, but it has also been prone to reliability issues, and has been criticised by drivers for its tricky clutch. Autosport posed the questions everyone is asking to the man at the top: series boss Bruno Michel.

Some of the drivers have said that the reliability issues could influence the result of the championship. Do you think that’s a big problem?

Number one, it’s a brand new car and a brand new engine. We’ve been testing and developing the car quite a lot. We’ve been doing it with a development car over the winter and in all the official tests. Of course you learn more things when you do testing with 20 cars than you do with only one car. So I would say that it’s quite natural that there are some technical gremlins to fix, little by little, and we’ve been working on it.

Can you give us details of the updates for the car in the near future?

We had a couple of issues, one pertaining to reliability and one pertaining to the start of the races of course. On both subjects, we have made a massive step. OK, we discovered in Bahrain that we had some issues. After that we made a massive step in Barcelona. We sorted 80 or 90% of the issues, and we have another step coming for Paul Ricard, where everything should be sorted on both of these issues.

Are the updates all likely to be related to software and ECU, or are there plans to change any parts too?

There are no parts changing because there are no issues with the parts. If you speak about the issues at the start, there are ways in which we are improving it. We are making some additional changes to the clutch control. So that’s purely a software development. The other thing is we are already improving the engine management. The engine is very safe, but we still think that we can improve.

There are a lot of F2 drivers who have involvement with F1 teams at the moment. Does that show that the championship is the best place for F1 to pick its drivers from?

We are very happy about that because we need to always keep in mind the objective of F2, which is to send drivers to F1. There have been some years where it has been difficult to do it and there have been years where we have had two, three drivers [go to F1]. It also depends on what seats are available in F1. Having all these drivers being test or reserve drivers for F1 teams is fantastic for us. It is recognition of the level. The car for us is not only to produce good racing, but it is also a school for drivers going to F1. It’s true that the drivers who have gone to F1 after that are always comfortable. And generally I think it’s more difficult to drive in F2 than in F1. We don’t have power-steering, electronic assistance.

It’s fantastic and they learn to work with the tyres too, which is awfully important. It shows the school we are providing works perfectly.