On whether Super Aguri feels any kind of stress at being the customer team for Honda engines, yet performing better than the main Honda F1 racing team:

First of all, we are an independent team and we have the contract with Honda and a supply to us an engine, gearbox, technology, etc., and under that contract, Honda must supply us with the same engine as the other team. We received a first class engine, a first class gearbox and first-class technological support.
What I can see that is not a good situation for us, is that the Honda top team should be fighting in the top positions with Ferrari and McLaren, and we should be fighting in the middle of the grid.

But because making a car is not easy, making a car that is competitive from the beginning, sometimes you have cars where it is so difficult to find the right balance, the right aero, that maybe their car is a little bit difficult to make the perfect setup. But I'm sure that with the resources they have they will make it competitive.

Our problem is that probably most of the resources now from Honda in Japan are going to help Honda, so we are a little bit - I won't say abandoned, because we have a contractual obligation - but the focus is much more to help Honda to make their car competitive. And the fact that we have been so competitive in the first races could also mean that because we are still a small team - and many people forget that we are only one year old - what will happen probably is that we will not keep the pace of the big teams, with their resources, their budget, and therefore we almost inevitably we will drift down the grid. If Honda makes their car competitive then they can redirect the resources to us, so we are not happy to beat Honda.

Quite the opposite. We prefer that Honda fights for the top positions and that we fight to take away points from their competitors. That would be the ideal scenario.

On Super Aguri's advantages as a small team, over Honda a big team, Super Aguri which is Japan-based, Honda Japan-owned but based in England:

It's true that we are a small team, but our engineers, our mechanics, are all first class. They're young, very motivated, very passionate. We don't have bureaucracy, we don't have politics in the team, we all go in one direction. And we are not losers even if we have a tough time. We are winners. But to win you need a budget, you need the resources that at the moment we don't have.
So it's easier to drive a team that is medium or small than to drive ateam that is a giant. Because you have inevitably bureaucracy and politics, it's more difficult to run a big team - unless you have a vision. You must sometimes be a visionaire. You must sometimes need to have this charisma. And to integrate a culture, the English and Japanese culture based in England is maybe not so easy, or it takes a little bit of time. Our team principal is Japanese and even if we are technically based in England our headquarters where we run all the commercial side, the marketing side, the PR side and the press side, and the sponsor side is in Tokyo. So I can concentrate as managing director on behalf of Aguri Suzuki, my team principal, just to concentrate on running the job. No politics.

And because we are small, we have very easy communication between the top and bottom. If we have a good idea, to put it immediately in place, we don't have to go through homologation, authorization, or ask if it is good or bad or test it against another idea, because we have three ideas at the same time. If you only have one idea it must work. If you have too much money, too many resources, you can have too many different rear wings, say, and forever weigh for one reason or the other what is good in one situation and what is good in another, and create confusion. But if you have limited resources and you make only one wing you have to make the best one out of the money and the resources you have. It must work. And then you go test it and if it's good you go racing. It's what we did last year with an old Arrows and we finished 10th in Brazil because we were so aggressive that every race we brought something new and we improved so much this old car that at the end of the championship we were tenth in the last race.

On how he uses his team's small size to attract top staff:

I have top guys who I took from other teams where they were No. 3 or 4. I said: 'Look, here you have a chance to become No. 1. But you have to prove it, because we will be very tough.' In the first three or four months we worked 24 hours a day for seven days a week. Even Christmas Day we spent in the factory and we allowed the family to come to see the dad in the factory because otherwise they won't even go home. And that's how we made it to the grid in Bahrain for the first race last year. So these tough times also cemented our team. Because they went through such a difficult time and they were so successful. Only in achieving being on the grid was already a big challenge, and to finish the championship and to be 10th in the last race ... the team is extremely motivated, extremely professional.