A question to you all: can you talk us through the mass damper situation as you understand it from your point of view?
Pascal Vasselon: Yes, Formula One control presents a very specific issue, because we are running very hard suspension on top of very soft tyres and it's very tricky to control the body movements. From our point of view, we have been working on this, of course, but we went in the direction of classical suspension elements, which are not mass dampers, so at the moment it's not an issue.

Sam Michael: I would say that we've experimented with that type of damper and we definitely found gains with it on the track. We're obviously not running it at the moment, like most people. It will obviously be up to the FIA on the 22nd of August to decide what's what and to decide on the future direction for it. There's no doubt that you gain through less load oscillation on the tyres, particularly in the end of straight condition; that's the place where you find the main advantage, but it's all out there at the moment. We'll wait and see.

Ross Brawn: We've had a system fitted on occasions this year, not every race. Some tracks it seems to suit more than others and obviously we don't have the system fitted now.

And the appeal by the FIA against their own stewards' decision?
RB: I can understand how the situation's evolved but I think it's a little difficult, because we tend to use the FIA technical department as the reference and obviously if they make a dramatic mistake, then that needs correcting but we've had lots of occasions when we perhaps haven't agreed with their assessment of the situation. We've lobbied them and still not succeeded and we've abided by their decisions, which is the simplest way for everybody to work. Having said that, I can understand the frustrations that Renault have probably felt. But if we do get to the situation where we regularly challenge technical directors through the stewards, it's going to get very messy, so I hope we don't degenerate into that situation.

Pat Symonds: The devices have been in use at Renault since the last quarter of 2005 and we have raced with them at every race up to Germany. I think the events of Germany are pretty well documented, there's no point in discussing those. The stewards did challenge what we did and that now therefore has to go to the Court of Appeal as the FIA have appealed against the stewards. It's actually nothing to do with Renault, it's between the FIA and the stewards. As that's a process that's on-going, I don't think it's correct for me to comment on the technicalities of it, although we have our defence, if you like, of our position. We have every faith in the International Court of Appeal. We believe it is an unbiased final judgement and we shall wait and see what the outcome is.

Pascal, you became technical director just a few months ago, a fairly major job for you. How are you getting on with it, has it been a steep learning curve?
PV: I'm trying hard, I'm obviously working hard, but for a definitive answer you had better ask my boss. Of course I have a lot of new things to learn about, but when you are not technical director in my case but general manager chassis, first of all you have to understand where there is a problem in the car and the dominant performance factors, and in this area I had some experience before coming to Toyota.

The cars have been going much better since North America but little things have been going wrong; how easy or difficult has it been to get on top of those problems?
PV: In view of performance, it's obviously getting better and better but we still have too many reliability issues. We are working hard on that and it probably doesn't indicate that we took more risk in all areas, packaging, cooling, but we are working on it and we fix problems one after the other.

Sam, new driver pairing announced, in particular Alexander Wurz. Tell us about him as a test driver, as a third driver and interesting to elevate him as a race driver, given that he's only done one race in the last three or four years.
SM: I think ever since Alex came to Williams, he's made a massive contribution to our programme on Fridays, obviously, with his selection of tyres and working on set-up. Both Nico and Mark had confidence in him almost immediately and the decisions that he took, which was really good because if he tests different things on Friday they just carry it straightaway, knowing through all the tests that they've done that it's valid for making the car go faster. I think the other thing is that he's someone who's got a lot of experience, he's a very intelligent guy, really does understand cars from an engineering perspective as well, and he brought a lot to the team in terms of moving us forward on suspension set-up, electronics, engine driveability, there were lots of genuine things. There's a difference between talking a good show and actually doing it and Alex very much delivered to the team throughout the winter and helped us improve a lot of areas. In the racing that he has done, he's obviously always performed and we're happy to have him on board. He's a fantastic character outside of the car as well. He's got a very good sense of humour and character and he's also a big contributor so I'm quite happy to have him in the team.

Now Mark has raced very well over the last few races but something always seems to go wrong for him. What have been the main problems, have you been getting on top of them?
SM: I think that we've had a lot of reliability issues on Mark's car this year. He's delivered probably over thirty points that haven't resulted in points because of car failures and unfortunately, this year, we've probably had three or four very annoying small problems which are quite straightforward to fix, which should have come up in testing but didn't and it means that instead of being fifth or so in the Constructors' we're eighth. That's obviously pretty hard for Mark to take because he has delivered on at least three or four occasions where he would have been on the podium and had done the job properly but we obviously let him down. It's a matter of us continually looking at our own systems and making sure we improve those and get on top of them.