Symonds calls for long term strategy for F1

Long time Formula One engineer Pat Symonds has stressed the need for a long term strategy for Formula One in a recent interview. The Englishman, who was involved in F1 for decades, has pinned his hopes on Ross Brawn to finally end the reactive management style of the sport.

Symonds, who left his post at Williams at the end of last year, said that knee-jerk reactions to internal or external issues have always been the order of the day in Formula One, even though people realised it should be different.

"I hope that if nothing else we have a strategy in F1. We had a Strategy Group but they didn't really understand the meaning of the word. Hopefully things can be thought through, and in addition to thinking it through you can be looking at where we might be in years to come.

"I've always worked on three-year plans. I revise those three-year plans, I don't wait until the end of them and start again – I look at them at the end of six months, extend them by six months, and see what's valid and what isn't valid.

"I think F1 needs to do something similar – five years rather than three years because of the complexity of it."

While Symonds admitted that the 2017 cars will look and be driven more aggressively, he also agreed with increasing worries that overtaking may become more difficult yet again, possibly only shifting the problem, exactly because the only intention of the new regulations was to make the cars quicker. In that process, other important issues were strangely forgotten.

"The brief, for what it was worth, was to make it five seconds quicker. There wasn't even any rationale as to why we should do that," he said.