Mark Preston: We had our first shake down of the SA06 last week and everything went quite well. We ran through a number of issues as you do with any new car and everything was fine. We had a few problems that we were able to sort out overnight and then we continued with the second car on Thursday at Santa Pod where we just checked out a few of the things we'd fixed overnight. We were therefore mainly making adjustments to get the right settings on the car and those sorts of things. On the whole the shakedown went quite well so we're reasonably happy.

Could you please explain about the new car and the changes you've made?
MP: It is hard to describe because - as you know from when Toyota started etc - it's an ongoing development. This development really has focused on the rear end of the car which has a new quick-shift gearbox from Honda R&D. It seemed to be working quite nicely during our first running last week. With the new gearbox comes a lot of integration. You've probably seen that the previous car had a lot of compromises to get the gearbox to match up with the engine, for example. The rear end is now a lot neater; the gearbox is obviously made for the engine, to fit with the hydraulics etc. Added to that, obviously the SA05 had suspension from 2002 and tyres have moved on a long way since then, so the rear suspension needed a lot of attention. We did an amount of analysis at the start of the year and, with running the SA05, we could at least see the areas that we needed to change and we completed a lot of work with Bridgestone and have developed a new rear suspension. Coming with that, integrating the gearbox and the engine together in a more efficient way, we've also saved a lot of weight, so we now have a reasonable amount of ballast on the car, a reduced centre of gravity and all those things that come from the integration of the two areas. This should give the race engineers a bit of room to play with weight distribution which, as you know, is quite important for the tyres nowadays. So there are a number of things that have been modified in that area.

Then moving on you may have seen things like the rear lower main plane on the car - the rear lower wing is very boring on the previous car, but we didn't have time to come up with something interesting, so now we're onto the twin pylon arrangement which has allowed the lower main plane to become much more aerodynamic which has then in turn allowed changes to the floor and changes to the top bodywork. We have done a lot more work on aerodynamics and you can see now the SA06 has new sidepods, new style radiator inlet ducts, we've got new top body, the heat shielding across the gearbox now integrates properly with the engine …. so underbody and overbody flow is a lot better because of the changes to the rear end.

What is the downforce gain from the old car to the new car?
MP: Downforce gain I think is in the realm of 10%. I'd have to check my numbers but I think that's right. Other areas - we've got about 20 kilos more ballast so we've got a fair bit of room to play with now where as we were very restricted in the SA05. Moving forward to the front of the car, the monocoque is heavily revised because we're going to have new front suspension, but that’s not available until Turkey. The reason for that is when we started doing work on the front suspension we found not only were we obviously doing gains for the tyres, but we had some aero gains and those aero gains knocked on to some mechanical changes that we had to make and we therefore decided that it was better to wait another race or two to bring the more optimised package. The monocoque is revised such that it can take new front suspension when it arrives for the Turkish Grand Prix. In short, we have achieved weight reduction, optimisation for the tyres and aerodynamic developments all over the car.

Will it be still on a twin keel concept?
MP: No, it will be a zero keel. The car has been modified so you can do that.

What is your estimation in gaining in actual lap times?
MP: That's a hard question to answer right now. Obviously I could do all sorts of simulations that could tell you anything from half a second to five seconds depending on what you want to believe, but obviously it's not going to be five seconds! What do I believe? I'd rather wait and see tomorrow (Friday) but we haven't even got the full new package on tomorrow. We'll obviously still be optimising the car, as you saw from the start of the year. We've been analysing our percentage from the front of the grid and looking at our performance over the season and you'll see that over the first eight races we slowly increased our performance relative to the pole. I think that the same thing will start to happen from tomorrow (Friday). We'll obviously be dialing in the car, understanding the aerodynamics, understanding the set-up's, understanding if the wind tunnel is completely correct or if we have to do some adjustments - so I think the time will come in, probably all the way up to Turkey where we get the front suspension. We'll be optimising as we go, so I think that it will be difficult to see what the actual lap time gain is because everybody else is moving forward as well. Renault and Ferrari aren't letting up, so they're obviously moving forward at a fairly impressive rate so any easy lap time comparison will go out the window because everyone else is moving forward so fast. So if I said five seconds, if they've moved forward a second then that will be irrelevant.

After all that work would one second will be fairly disappointing for you?
MP: We'll have to see. At the last race we made a big gain because we had the right tyre choice, so there's still a lot in optimising the tyres, the temperatures…. This weekend we will be slightly more conservative on tyre choice because we do not know the SA06 car well yet. We haven't been able to test it properly so that could have an effect as well, so there's a bit of time still to be had out of the car. We shall be working extremely closely with Bridgestone over the weekend to see how everything is going and to see how we might make different tyre choices for Turkey and future races.

When is the third car due?
MP: The third car is proposed for Turkey, as there has not been enough time to get another SA06 ready by next week. We've brought an SA05 with us as a back-up plan, just in case we have any problems.