Kimi Raikkonen's mistake on the penultimate lap gifted Michael Schumacher second place, and two points more than the German had been expecting. Nonetheless, it had been a strange weekend for the Italian team, how did Jean Todt feel about the race?

"It's a little bit like Silverstone," he relies, "when you are pretending to win and you finish second and fifth.

"So, a bit disappointed but saying that, we chose a strategy which was to do qualifying with a lot of fuel and it's always easy afterwards to say it was good, not good, but it was not good enough to allow us to win the race. Saying that, second and fifth is not as good as first and second, but important points in the championship, but it is making it more difficult, because every time you lose three points to the opposition, who mainly race with one car, one driver, who makes no mistakes, and for whom everything goes well… it makes things difficult, but that's the challenge."

Asked about Raikkonen's 'gift' to Michael, Todt said: "I would have preferred to received one present in front, one more, so we had half a present. We got one Finnish/German present but we didn't get a Spanish/France present.

"Maybe next time…" he smiles.

Asked about the lack of grip throughout the weekend, the Frenchman shrug one of his typical Gallic shrugs. "If you take carefully the lap times of Trulli during qualifying, he's about one second slower than Michael. Weight is performance, and during the race, if you see that once Michael managed to pass Trulli, when you look at the final result Trulli is a lap behind. We were probably missing some grip in qualifying, but our performance was not so bad."

"The expression damage limitation has been used a lot," says a journalist, "when did you realise it was going to be damage limitation, before you got here or during the weekend?
"At the end of the race," the Frenchman responds. "If the race is not over, anything can happen, and finally to finish second and fifth as against first and fourth, it's three points difference, it's limited, but I would prefer the other way around."

An obvious question, but it has to be asked; "what makes Renault so strong?" Todt's response is equally obvious: "They have a good package, good driver, good team, no mistakes."

So, what the difference between the two teams… "Probably it's a little bit everywhere," he admits, "they have a better first lap in qualifying, about two tenths. If you take the weight of the cars, knowing when they stopped, when we stopped it's about two tenths, so maybe they have a better first lap and as for consistency, it's very difficult from one race to another one, the development of the track, the development of the tyres, the weather conditions."

Does Ferrari have any particular chassis or engine developments coming which may give you it an advantage over Renault, is there any step that Todt has seen that might encourage him?
"We know roughly what is coming for us," he admits, "but we don't know what is coming for the others. So it's during the course of the race weekend that we have an understanding. When you do seven hundred kilometres a day in private testing it's because you have something to test which is due to improve the performance of the car. That we don't know."