My Time in F1

You know, I had the experience of working with some great teams and on some “interesting” projects. For ex­ample, I was in the Ligier team when they had the Alfa Romeo engine, and that was a very difficult period. The problem was that Alfa had a lot of people who worked on the engine—and on other things—and if you compared that with Ferrari or McLaren or Williams, they were stronger because they had a team working only on the engine. In Formula One, if you don’t have good engineers working hard together, it is not possible to have a good result. I did a lot of tests with that car and engine, but the problem was that you needed to have new parts when you broke something, not just repair that part and test again. That was what happened, and they often didn’t go away and redesign and make new parts. You know, with that approach, it is impossible to have reliability.

The problem at the time was that Alfa Romeo had good people but they needed to be able to work better and really much quicker. It was difficult, in the coordination between Ligier and Alfa, to get things done—to find a new engine in one hour if you needed it—and I wasn’t in Formula One to just stay on the grid…I wanted to stay on the front of the grid! It was very difficult to work under these conditions. I am sure if Alfa had said, “We push very hard, we put a lot of people into this,” then it would have been possible to have a good result, but nobody decided to do that. I am not sure how it came to an end. I was a driver and I accepted to work very hard with everybody on the chassis and engine. I knew the car could be competitive, but I wanted to develop something with reliability, not just to be on the grid.