Expensive also-rans shaming the name

Heads roll as big spenders Jaguar and BAR fail to deliver.

At a time when formula one is striving to rein in its tendency to spend, spend, spend, the profligacy displayed by two of its poorer performers, British American Racing and Jaguar, is all the more shocking.

Despite an outlay of around £4m on the design process of each of their new cars, and hundreds of hours spent in wind tunnel development, BAR and Jaguar are stuck with machinery that has little hope of worthwhile success.

As a result both teams have been forced to take the dramatic step of firing their heads of design. Jaguar's technical director Steve Nichols was sacked last month, at an estimated cost of £350,000 in severance payments, when the new R3 proved to be slower than its predecessor.

Jaguar are paying the price of their engineers failing to realise that the wind tunnel used by the team for aerodynamic development in California was giving them incorrect readings. Consequently, instead of having more downforce than last year's car, the R3 had less.

Nichols was soon followed by BAR's engineering director Malcolm Oastler, dropped from his £600,000-a-year post last week after his BAR 004's dismal showings in the first two races of the year.

At the recent Malaysian grand prix the BAR driver Olivier Panis described his experiences as "the very worst weekend of my racing career" after gearbox and clutch problems throughout practice.

BAR go into tomorrow's Brazilian grand prix still seeking their first points of the season, having already spent £350m over 3 years to gain a total of 37 points. That adds up to around £9m per championship point, making the Brackley-based team, which is 51% owned by British American Tobacco, one of the most extravagant underachievers in formula one history.

Yesterday in practice their No1 driver Jacques Villeneuve flattered to deceive by running a light fuel load, while Jaguar's Eddie Irvine followed form, finishing 14th overall.

After paying a reputed £65m to purchase the team from Jackie Stewart and his family in 1999, the Ford and Jaguar management initially treated their acquisition like a new toy.

Jaguar's scrambled priorities were never better demonstrated than when Ford's chief executive Jacques Nasser visited last year's Australian grand prix.

Five uniformed members of the team were called upon to escort the Australian from the gates of the paddock to the Jaguar garage while the rest of the formula one community looked on in disbelief.

Nasser, who had flown direct to Melbourne from Detroit in Ford's corporate Gulfstream jet at a cost of around £200,000, was cosseted by fawning acolytes for an hour or so at the trackside before returning to the United States.

His visit became emblematic of the waste surrounding the struggling team. Seven months later, with Ford facing catastrophic global financial losses, Nasser was fired.

Jaguar's team principal, Niki Lauda, admits he was aghast when he found that the team's 20-strong marketing department had been travelling business class on short flights around Europe at £600 a time. "We soon put a stop to that."

Keeping costs under control is also a priority for his BAR counterpart David Richards, whose 430-strong team has a wage bill reputed to be £25m. Fifteen per cent of the workforce at Brackley are set to be laid off to make the operation leaner and more efficient.

Meanwhile Villeneuve is paid £11m and the team founder Craig Pollock, whom Richards replaced in a major management shake-up last December, is said to want around £43m to relinquish his shareholding in the company.

Jaguar, for their part, pay Irvine a cool £6m a year but he, like Villeneuve, is hamstrung in his efforts to justify his astronomical wages.

According to Lauda, the biggest problem is a shortage of truly gifted engineers in the sport as a whole. "What we really need to do is to recruit a whole new generation of formula one engineers and train them to our requirements," he said. "But that could take two or three years. I'm not sure we have that sort of time."

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