JANUARY 22, 2004

Questions over the Jaguar R5

Questions are beginning to be asked about the performance of the new Jaguar R5 after a couple of days of very disappointing performance in Barcelona. The word on the street is that the new car has a major aerodynamic problem but at the moment no-one at the team is contactable, as there seems to be a large number of meetings going on.

The Jaguar was given its first shakedown runs at Lommel in Belgium in the days before the launch on January 18 and the team then began testing in earnest in Barcelona. The new car's best lap so far has been a 1m18.087s with Christian Klien at the wheel. The fastest cars in the test have been recording times in the high 1m15s.

It is possible that Jaguar Racing has not yet given the car a proper run, going for lap times, but to fail to post any decent time at all is an odd philosophy as teams usually like to get a good picture of where they stand before they start playing around and sandbagging.

It is therefore not surprising that there are rumours beginning to circulate that all is not well.