Following a difficult, and highly different, weekend, Ferrari's Michael Schumacher was back on the top step of the podium, having given the Italian team its fifteenth win of the season, thereby equalling its achievement in 2002, and McLaren's in 1988.
Thanks to a typhoon that never arrived, the teams had no real dry running before the race got underway, therefore it was more about guesswork than out-and-out strategy, or was it? Ferrari's strategist, and technical director, Ross Brawn, sat down to answer a few questions.
"Firstly, what was the most important factor today? Why did you win?" "Because the car was very, very good," he replies, "it's a compliment to the people here and the people in the factory that the car was straightaway was good. The tyres were excellent, it's this new family of tyres which we first raced in Hungary and they worked very well today, so compliments to Bridgestone because the tyres were very, very good. So yes, it was a very straightforward race but always with a lot of potential to be difficult but everything worked well today."
"And are you happy with the choice of tyres specification?" "I don't know," admits the Englishman, "because we don't know how the other tyres would have performed. I have to be happy with the result. Both drivers said the tyres were excellent in the race, they were consistent and they had lots of grip, so we can't ask for more than that. So yeah, I was pretty happy with the choice."
"Did you change the strategy during the race, or was it the one you planned?" "It was always the strategy we planned," he responds, "a pretty aggressive strategy but we stayed with that strategy, we adjusted it a little bit with Rubens because he was starting that far back, but the strategies were as we planned from the beginning."
"Let's talk in general about this Ferrari, did you think it would be so good before the season began?" "No never," he admits. "I don't think it's in our character to assume that we're going to have such a successful season. We do the job we do, we have some great people working at Ferrari, and I think every year we've been able to produce a car that has been competitive. Of course you don't know what sort of job your competitors are going to do, the results are a function of the job you do and a function of the job your competitors do. I think our people did a great job. The car from 2003 to 2004 was a very good step and I think some of our competitors struggled this year so if you put the two together, it's given us a fantastic year but it's the sort of year we only dream about and this year it came true again."
"What, in your opinion, was the race you enjoyed the most this year?" "I think we've had some very interesting races," he reveals. "I think Magny Cours with the four stops was a very exciting race. I think Hungary was a very significant race for us because of the tyre situation, particularly after last year. Bridgestone is a great company to work with and we have a wonderful partnership and it was so rewarding to see the results they had in Hungary, because last year we were unhappy but they were especially unhappy. I think Bridgestone sometimes feel the pain more than we do when we don't do well. So Hungary was a very significant race for us. It was a new type of tyre, quite a different philosophy of tyre and it worked extremely well and we had the same tyre here today. So I think Hungary was a pretty critical race for us."
"And which disappointed you most? Monte Carlo?" "Yes," he smiles, "though I try not to think about the disappointments too much but yeah, we work as strong as I would have liked in Monte Carlo but certainly we had an opportunity to win the race and I think we made an optimistic or brave decision for the race and if I had to rely on somebody who could have done what we wanted to do Michael is the man who could have done it, but he never got an opportunity, so I was frustrated because it was a race we might have won, but it would have been a fantastic race for everyone to see, so yeah, that was probably a major disappointment."
"we now head to Brazil, Rubens has had two wins and would like to win again. A difficult race from the pit wall." "Well we would like to finish the season on, let's say, good spirit," he replies, "and I think our drivers are very competitive, they're human beings and they want to beat each other, but in a nice way and not in a nasty way, so I think Rubens is going to do everything he can, it's his ambition to win Brazil, but I don't think Michael is going to make it easy for him. Michael has hurt quite a lot these last few races being beaten by Rubens, so I think today was something a little bit special for Michael and I think in Brazil they are going to be tough competition for each other but of course we don't know where we will be regarding the opposition. We'll have this new tyre in Brazil and I think that will be a big help, but if we can be competitor, I think there will be a very strong race between our two drivers."
"How easy is it to work out dry settings by simulation?" "The difficult thing for us is that this new tyre that we have from Bridgestone is quite different to the old tyre," he replies, "and therefore we can't take the set-ups we had with the old tyre and necessarily adapt them, so we were looking very carefully at the Hungary data where we raced this tyre and extrapolating the set-up from Hungary, and there was a lot of work done before Friday but of course that work is never considered to be quite so critical because you assume you are going to have a couple of days practice but then when it became clear we were not going to get any practice before the race, the engineers spent a lot more time examining their conclusions of what they'd arrived at and changed it just a little bit, and the combination of the race engineers and technicians here and the combination of people back at the factory they did a fantastic job.
