Good afternoon everybody, thank you so much for coming. It's very pleasing to see so many of the press here and thank you for being here.

What I would like to do if you would allow me is to …. Four topics before inviting questions. They are the two incidents in Indianapolis which I think need a little bit of discussion, and the question of the rules for the Formula One in the future and then finally my imminent departure from the FIA. So those four topics.

If I could begin just briefly with the Ralf Schumacher accident at Indianapolis. I think there was a lot of misunderstanding among the media because he was there, in the car, not moving for rather more than one and a half minutes and this was widely criticised. It's important to understand why that happened, and if you will allow me a little bit of medical explanation - not being a doctor but nevertheless - the situation is this. If in the worst case, a driver is dead in the sense that his heart has stopped and he's not breathing, provided you can get a reanimation expert or resuscitation expert to him within two minutes, it's possible to start the heart again and get the circulation going and keep him sufficiently alive to go on a life support machine when you get him to hospital without him suffering irreversible brain damage. You then decide what to do.

Now, after two minutes, taking into account the time for resuscitation, irreversible brain damage can occur and shortly after that, death. Now this particular situation doesn't occur in everyday life. If you have a serious accident and somebody's heart has stopped and he's not breathing, the chance of somebody being anywhere near him who can resuscitate him unless he's in a hospital, is minimal. So it doesn't really arise in road accidents.

In Formula One, for some considerable time, we've had a system in place where we arrange the medical cars around the circuit in such a way that within two minutes there is always a resuscitation expert there so we can always get the circulation going sufficiently to get him on a life support system without irreversible brain damage and that's existed for a number of years, as I say.

So the first thing is that we must have that man there within two minutes. The second thing is that everyone's instinct, particularly if you see somebody motionless in a car, is to rush in and try and help him. In fact it's the most dangerous thing you can do. If he's got a broken neck or a broken spine, the one thing you don't want is an enthusiastic amateur trying to help, above all, not trying to get the helmet off. It doesn't matter if it takes one and a half, two minutes to get somebody there because even if he has stopped breathing, you can still fix it.

What does matter is if the wrong person does the wrong thing. So therefore there is this absolutely strict instruction: leave him alone, wait until the experts get there, they will be there within two minutes. That is the time. Don't get involved. So that's what we say to the marshals.

Now you will have noticed at Indianapolis there were marshals the other side of the pit wall. There is one circumstance in which all of those precautions are forgotten and that is if the car catches fire. Obviously then if somebody is motionless in a car, you must get him out of the car because it's on fire, you must take whatever risk you have to take. But nowadays, we very much hope that we don't get cars catching fire. If they do catch fire, then obviously we would have to act.

Final point on that: the marshals were there, why didn't they go to him? There was nothing they could do because they were instructed not to touch him. All that would happen is that there is still a small risk, however hard we try, that another car crashes into the car that is stationary. In that case, the two drivers are at risk, but it would be completely stupid to allow marshals also to be at risk, bearing in mind that they can't do anything, they are not allowed to do anything. They would simply be standing there risking their lives to no purpose.

So the procedure with Ralf Schumacher… it looks terrible because you feel instinctively I must get in there, I must do something but in fact exactly the right procedures were followed and as it happens, he was hurt but he wasn't seriously hurt but had he been, all the right things were done.

So that was Ralf Schumacher. I just wanted to make that clear because it didn't look right but it was right.

Montoya. I've got enormous sympathy for Montoya and I think the press were right when they say it's terrible that he did so many laps and was then excluded. However, when… the rule, rightly or wrongly, but it's a rule that all the teams wanted and agreed, if he leaves the grid after the 15 seconds, before the cars depart, he's broken the rule and can't take part in the race.

In fact the amount of time involved was three seconds. We knew it was very marginal, therefore our people had to get every possible piece of information: videos, timing sheets, witness statements and so on. Get all that information together to be quite certain that he really did infringe the rule by, as it turns out, three seconds.

Now, had we not done a thorough job, and had somebody for example, come with a video after he'd been excluded immediately and demonstrated that he was within the rule, it would have been a terrible situation for everybody, because it's like executing somebody, you can't un-execute them. Once you've put him out of the race, he's out, so you must not put somebody out of the race unless you are absolutely certain.