Not long before I arrived, they had sacked a man in the machine shop, and it was like a public hanging. This guy had machined a piston incorrectly, and despite what I have said about quality control, it was the engine that blew up in the warm-up lap at Magny Cours the year before. They’d had an investigation and this guy had got hung, drawn and quartered and sacked: ‘This is what will happen to anyone that doesn’t keep up the standards.’ I thought that was shocking: the system had broken down, he hadn’t broken down. And I wouldn’t allow this to happen, which led to my only conflict with Luca
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