John Noble

even in a friendly conversation, would be quite angry about things.

So there was a base level of anger.

But if you wanted to get that anger to an increased level, just talk about Dallara.

So he was very unhappy about what was kind of being provided and the level of quality expected.

And I think Jeff Willis talked at the end of the year that...

believing that the step up from GP2 to F1 would be 30% was actually, you need to be 10 times better, more refined.

It was the era where things had stepped up in F1, which cost a lot of money.

And these teams, remember, had come into F1 and originally promised it'd be under a cost cap and it wouldn't be.

Limits on budgets, the cost cap never happened, situations changed, things got very expensive.

And that relationship that potentially may have worked under a cost cap wasn't going to work in terms of the demands needed.

So in the end, it was either going to head to a split or it was going to head to a court case.

Yeah, it's easy to buy a team that's about to win the World Championship.

I can't remember the exact timings of when it was all confirmed, but I'm not sure if they'd won the championship by then.

But it was definitely the championship team.

You're coming in, you had this dream with...

Silver Arrays are back.

We can fight at the front.

But the reality was Braun was a team that had a very good car because it spent 12 months developing it.

had then capitalised on a rules loophole at the start of the season to win the early races, managed to hang on by the skin of its teeth despite almost zero money, zero development, minimal upgrades, the absolute bare minimum.

So partly naive to think that arriving into that team, throwing extra budget at it, development resources in that timeframe was going to result in you returning to where you were at the start of the previous season.