Quite simply, Jaguar were a shambles. They had been showing some promise in their previous guise as Stewart, but all that evaporated in 2000 as Jaguar degenerated into a lumbering, ineffectual monolith.

The car was poor, the engine had to be redesigned, their approach lacked direction. In short, everything was wrong.

It would have been difficult for them to get any worse in 2001, but they did not look to have got any better, either.

Around the mid-season mark, after aerodynamic changes made to the car, the team at last appeared to be making progress. But then they seemed to stagnate yet again.

Eddie Irvine was third in Monaco - scoring as many points in one race as the team managed in the whole of last year - and there were other promising showings.

There is no doubt that Jaguar want a winning team by 2003, but the overall impression at the moment is of an outfit that does not know what they need to do to get it right.

Irvine says that Jaguar are heading in the right direction - and next year will be a crucial one, for it will be the first evidence of whether the new staff employed are doing the job.