Canada? We are sad because it’s a great race, we like to go there. I think one of the targets of FOTA is to actually ask the commercial rights holder to really establish a strong foothold in North America, particularly the US, with a race which showcases Formula One well, and is, if you like, economically beneficial to Formula One as a whole. So I think this is one of the core discussions FOTA wishes to have because it is a very important market for our sponsors and for Formula One and hopefully in the next one to two years we can establish a proper race in the United States which is good for all of us.

NF: On Canada, we are hugely disappointed – it’s difficult to emphasise by how much. Honda is very successful in Canada, we make cars there, the local company there is hugely enthusiastic about Formula One. We have large numbers of guests from America and from Canada. We sponsor the event, we would like to see it back on the calendar as soon as possible and I support John’s comments that I think it will be a major topic of conversation among the teams at the next meeting of the teams. I think we need to look at North America on a more strategic basis. As soon as we were down to one race on the continent, things inevitably were going to get difficult because the costs of transportation and appearing just once across the other side of the Atlantic were huge and I think really we need to look at how we’re not just going to get back Canada but how we get back to America, potentially more than once, as it is such an important market.

On the other subject, I agree completely to the previous comments. The thing I would add is that we do need to work together as ten teams to make sure that the ten teams stick together, work together and survive. We’ve got a fantastically successful series, we’ve just come off the back of arguably one of the best weekends and we need to preserve that. Like Mario, I’m incredibly encouraged by the first round of meetings of FOTA but the first meetings are inevitably usually the easiest ones. It’s when you get down to the nitty gritty it gets somewhat more difficult. There’s a lot of diversity in the income and the levels of sponsorship, the parent company ownership of the teams. At one of the scale is probably a company like Honda or Toyota or BMW which are extremely successful in share price. Certainly Honda has done rather better or lost rather less than most of the others but we shouldn’t be complacent and what we’ve got to do is to make sure that other teams which maybe aren’t making money and do have sponsors that are hugely affected by the latest financial crisis do come through it and I think FOTA and the meetings with the FIA and with Bernie (Ecclestone) are the mechanism to try and make sure that happens. We really do have to pull together, we’ve got off to a good start but the difficult bit is yet to come.

Q: (Ken Kawakita – Sportiva) Again, I would like to ask you about the recent economic crisis. The situation is very difficult to predict; how quickly do you have to react to this economic situation? You have been talking about cost-cutting and now it looks as if you’ve made a practical step but is the regulation about the long-term future quickly enough? Will you have to make a change a bit earlier than you expected?
MT: We have heard right now that Formula One is a very strong operation and it’s a big operation and it’s very much technology-driven, so that means there is no need to panic, that’s message number one. Message number two: you cannot change things of this technical complexity overnight, so we need to take a reasonable approach, an approach which satisfies all the needs including the need for all the teams involved to cut costs. On the other hand it has to be a viable route which means we cannot come up with a low cost engine within a few months. This would require huge additional expenses on the manufacturer side, so that means we have to look at a certain period of time and at a combination of measures which can lead us to the final target which is do-able in the short term and then prepare for the long-term future in a commercially viable way.