Pat, Alonso said the car wasn't suited to this circuit. Is it not possible for a car to suit all the circuits? Is it always a compromise?
Pat Symonds: I am sure it is possible. You know, when you talk about whether a car is competitive or not it is a relative thing. Of course, you are striving for perfection but you are striving to beat the other guys. I suppose each car has its individuality and characteristics which tend to be the DNA of the car, the designers' thoughts and so on, they do tend to carry through from year to year. I have to say Silverstone is a circuit that troubles us a little bit more than most.

Giancarlo was sitting up here yesterday saying he has had a lot of bad luck. Is that the case?
PS: Yeah, it is. I don't really believe in bad luck but there certainly have been some unfortunate circumstances that have occurred to him this year, they are not things that we can say right we will fix this or fix that, they are things that have happened that have been beyond our control and I suppose if that is bad luck then, yes, he has had it.

So you are willing to believe it?
PS: Almost!

Mike, that was your best Friday performance, you told me earlier.
Mike Gascoyne: We have to wait and see. Yes it was a good morning for us, but it is always relative depending on what programme other people are running, so I think you have to be very cautious on a Friday at any racetrack. But in general we had a very trouble free session, a very easy session, most things went right, the things we did went in the right direction and the car seemed reasonably competitive, so from that point of view it was a good session. But I think I would hold on a bit before laying any great claims that it is going to be a good weekend for us, but certainly it should be a very solid weekend for us.

You have had some podiums this year but it has, on occasions, gone backwards. Do you know why that is?
MG: I think sometimes we have had some good qualifying and the race pace has not been so good. When that has happened it is because generally we have got something wrong on the car on the balance for race day. The car has been pretty consistent on all tracks. I think just the last few races we have thrown away some good positions. In Canada we had the brake problem with Jarno when he was third and would have finished on the podium, so I don't think we have particularly dropped off, I think we just have not taken all the things that are available to us. I think we can still race for podiums at most of the circuits for the rest of the year.

In a way it is still a learning curve.
MG: Yeah, this is the first time up the sharp end for the whole team and they are a young team and the guys there are learning that when you are at the sharp end you have got to get everything right. We have made a couple of mistakes on the pit wall and throughout the weekend in the last few races and that is probably natural with such a young team. But if we want to be racing at the sharp end we have got to get it all right.

We have seen today that the two third cars have been particularly quick. Adrian, can you quantify the benefit from having that third car?
Adrian Newey: It is circuit dependant. Here, to be perfectly honest, it hasn't been particularly useful but there are other circuits where it has been very useful. It depends on whether it is a hard decision to make on tyres, or a balance problem becomes evident early in the session, because we are able to go out early in the session whereas our race cars would wait to limit the mileage. We had a good test here a few weeks ago and so far the balance of the car has been fairly similar to how it was at that test, so today it wasn't particularly useful having a third car, but it varies.

Everyone has been saying the McLaren is superior to the Renault here, at this particular circuit, can you say how or why?
AN: I hope we will be still saying that on Sunday evening! People take their positions, maybe here we will be, I don't know, I don't like to say.

Obviously, Renault have proved very competitive this year and sometimes they are ahead, sometimes we are ahead. Hopefully this will be one of the ones where we are ahead. As Pat said earlier, this is almost DNA, I think that was a good expression. In some circuits McLaren has been quite strong and Silverstone has been one of those, so hopefully that will carry through this weekend. It is not always clear why that is, you can theorise about the nature of the circuit, but in my opinion it is not as clear cut as some people would have you believe.

Sam, today seems a bit the same as last weekend so far, can you see improvement in sight?
Sam Michael: What we basically did is for Magny-Cours we had quite a big upgrade to the car, which basically is the whole package, and obviously with the limited testing there is now it is a very risky strategy. We did two days testing at Jerez, before Magny-Cours, and saw a couple of problems but I think we underestimated how big those problems were before we took it to France. And in the meantime we have had quite an extensive programme in the wind tunnel this week. We have done a couple of things this afternoon which have started to give us some pretty good direction on where the problem is, whether we get to the bottom of it before the end of this weekend we don't know yet, but we definitely started to make some improvements this afternoon. A lot of our strategy this year, because we started off behind, was to throw a lot of bits at the car and a lot of it is untested, and I would say out of the majority of the time, 90 percent of the time, it works.
This time it has bitten us. But we will pick it all up and make sure we sort it as soon as we can.