Q: Kimi, an eventful day, a great race and an alarming first corner from your point of view; it looked as though Felipe Massa was right up inside you there.
Kimi Raikkonen: Yeah, I got quite a good start. I went on the outside and then halfway through the corner, I think it was Massa hit me in the rear. The car then felt really a bit funny and I almost came in, because I thought something had broken at the rear but I kept going and there was only a little damage on the floor. Then I got past Michael after the restart but after that, after I got past Michael, I got some sort of problem with the downshift so every time when I went down to downshift, the car was just pushing forward and the gears were not going in. So the whole race I was struggling, I was quite slow at that point but then sometimes it started to work. I was turning the switches all the time and trying to get the car back to the finish line and it wasn’t easy to try but it was good enough to win.

Q: Amazing. Talk about that last restart. The pressure was on, Michael was right behind you, a few laps to go, everything to play for.
KR: Yeah. I know that it should work pretty well after the restart and quite often when we slow down after really fast laps the tyres even get better, so the tyres worked very well on the first and second lap after the restart and I think I got the fastest lap on the restart lap. I couldn’t hope for a better result today.

Q: An incredible win, the first win for your team since Malaysia 2003. Your thoughts on the team finally returning to the podium?
KR: It’s very good for the team and for me. We’ve had such a difficult season and when we got the 19B out, we had some speed and results but we have still been struggling to finish sometimes and we’ve finally now got what we deserved and hopefully we can keep it up this year and challenge for the title next year.

Q: Michael, what a day. Difficult to know where to start from your point of view so let’s hear it from you. In those early laps, obviously you faded a little bit. Was that a question of the tyres coming up to temperature at a different rate to perhaps the opposition?
Michael Schumacher: I think so. It was an eventfully day, honestly, with all the safety cars and the conditions we had at that moment. It was a tough one and considering where I had dropped back to, and where I finished now, I think I should only be happy, anyway. We clinched the championship, we had a tough fight, Kimi drove a superb race. I think all three of us can be very happy to be here at the moment, if you imagined what happened to Rubens and still he managed to come back to third position, so it’s a great day for all of us and I’m just so delighted and happy. I would have honestly and obviously rather finished the championship with a victory, but today we simply weren’t strong enough at the right moments and that’s the way it is. We have won so many races this year it was clear that at some stage somebody else would win and today it happened, the better one won and we’re quite happy with what we achieved.

Q: It’s amazing how Spa keeps coming back into your career as a place for momentous occasions.
MS: Yeah, that’s true. If you think what I have achieved here, how things started here and finally I can say I won a very important and a very prestigious number, a seventh championship here at Spa. It’s the seven hundredth Grand Prix for Ferrari, it’s my seventh win in the championship and it’s just 700 the other way around! And it’s the right number for us.

Q: Rubens, what a day for you as well. Contact right at the start at La Source.
Rubens Barrichello: Well, to be honest, I have to go and see what happened on the video. I had a good start and I think I had Fisichella covered quite well. Then, as I turned into the corner, there was a contact. I was able to keep on going but soon I saw there was damage to my rear tyre. Then, on that lap, they told me to come back because there was damage to the wing and at Spa it’s too difficult to drive with wing damage. So I came in, they did a superb job to keep me going and I think I was more than five seconds behind the last car so I had a day when I kept on pushing the whole time, so I have to be happy.

Q: How did the car feel in the later stages of the race? You looked very quick right at the end there.
RB: Yeah, the car was very good. We had a small problem with the warming up situation but I had a Jordan right in the middle, so I couldn’t have done any better, I had to go through the whole of Eau Rouge behind the Jordan car so I lost time to Michael anyway.

Q: Kimi, some final thoughts from you: a great race, Michael clinched the championship here and you raced him hard and fast throughout the day. Your thoughts and reflections on that race?
KR: I must say very happy because we won the race and we’ve been working hard. And congratulations to Michael on winning the championship and hopefully we can challenge him or whoever it is next year. But for the whole team it was a very good day: starting from tenth and finishing first. Maybe many people didn’t believe that we could do that, but we had a strong car already on Friday and even in the wet conditions it wasn’t bad, but I made a small mistake yesterday which cost me some places, so there will definitely be some good partying today.

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