The way it was presented to me he said was that there

"The way it was presented to me," he said, "was that there was a fear than an engine manufacturer would simply come in with a V12 that would blow everybody away. It appears they're worried about Honda coming in and having the capacity to do that."Pollock refused to confirm strong rumours that he has agreed a deal with Honda for a supply of engines next year, and would only say that he had "no idea" about the Japanese manufacturer's reaction to a 12-cylinder ban.Some interested parties are frank about their support for the move. "I think it would be a wise decision," Norbert Haug, the competitions director of Mercedes-Benz, said "We'd all save a lot of money. If one manufacturer starts with a 12, probably all the rest have to join. And I think it's not going to make the show better."Flavio Briatore, the boss of Supertec, which supplies engines to Williams, Benetton and BAR, argued that the ban would equalise the competition and provide better entertainment. "It's better to have one kind of Formula One engine for a few years, to give everybody the possibility of catching up and to spend less money," he said. "The spectators just want to see fighting between the cars."The boss of the struggling Arrows team, Tom Walkinshaw, agreed.

"If you're serious about saving money," he said, "you've got to stop the development of V12s before anyone has one Several people are scheming them at the moment We'd all have to design totally new cars. Once somebody's got one, it's too late."The rules of Formula One have been progressively tightened, but throughout its history the engines that power the cars have come in all shapes and sizes, following whatever fashion happened to hold sway. There have been complex 16-cylinder engines from Auto Union and BRM, and relatively crude four-cylinder units from Vanwall, nevertheless good enough to win the inaugural constructors' championship in 1958, and from BMW in the early 1980s, a turbocharged device putting more than a thousand horsepower at the driver's disposal. There have been highly strung straight-eights from Alfa Romeo and Mercedes-Benz, and a flat-four from Porsche that looked like something out of a Volkswagen Beetle. And the fact that they all made different noises added a dimension to the sport's appeal.Such a factor is unlikely to sway the men who own the teams, and are anxious to protect the profits that have placed them among the world's super-rich. More surprisingly, the marketing divisions of major companies like Ford, Fiat and Daimler-Chrysler (the new conglomerate parent of Mercedes- Benz) now seem less interested in demonstrating the superiority of their engineering innovations, which is the traditional argument for motor racing's right to exist, than in simply getting their names on the television screen, and in getting rid of any obstacle that might stand in their way.Engineers like Head and Brawn automatically regret the application of technical limits. Other participants, like Walkinshaw, believe that even a standardised engine format offers the scope for technical ingenuity.

"There's a lot to be explored in the construction of engines, the materials you use and so on," he said. "I don't think it'll inhibit the creativity of our designers one bit."Craig Pollock, the newest voice among the team principals, stressed the important of fairness, while voicing a reservation. "If everyone has V10s, they're working from the same parameters. But it's a bit of a pity that we are cutting out the possibility of creating new technologies, because Formula One is meant to be the technological ultimate in motor sport."Even the engineers recognise the need for restrictions.