A question really for you all: obviously this year's engines have been homologated, their specification basically frozen. I wonder if you can give some indication of how you feel your specific engines are performing in comparison to the competition?
Pat Symonds: I think that one of the interesting things about the homologated engines is that it was done at one of the few times in the history of Formula One when engines were remarkably even and that surprised me because it was a new formula, the 2.4 V8. It's the time when you might expect there to be more variation but I think that the fact that the 2.4 V8 is a very limited design anyway, in terms of its mass, its centre of gravity and a lot of principal dimensions, it probably meant that there wasn't a lot of room to manoeuvre anyway. Now when you couple that with an imposed rev limit, I think actually the engines are remarkably even, and probably more even than I remember for many years.

Willy Rampf: I basically confirm what Pat says. With the same design, V8, everything is so specified: crankshaft heights, centre of gravity and I think the major part, the rev limiter, is the same for all the engines. I think there is not a lot of scope for a huge difference in engine performance.

Jacky Eeckelaert: Well, obviously I agree but it's not only the limiting of the engine revs – of course, that is the factor that has been used in the past to increase the power of the engine – but also the stopping of all development of the internals of the engine, because you could imagine, let's say, rpm is limited to 19,000 but development allowed for the inside of the engine, which could lead maybe to different coatings, reducing friction which is then increasing horsepower, reducing bearing size by using different materials but all that has also been stopped. So I think, honestly, all the engines are very close to each other in terms of performance.

Pat, what has it taken to regain some of the ground that you seem to have regained in Monaco, and perhaps here as well?
PS: A lot of sleepless nights, a lot of hard work, a lot of logical thought, a lot of honesty and what I mean by all of that, it's a question of going back, looking at your data, looking at your experimental result, both in the wind tunnel, on the track, cfd (computational flow dynamics), all of this and being very critical in your analysis of it, using that to narrow things down. I've said many times in the past, a lot of the early work was eliminating the impossible and being left with the possible. Then going through that and trying to understand it. We're well into that process now, and we are starting to see results. It's a very, very difficult process to follow when you're also trying to improve the car, and keep up with the huge rate of development that we see in Formula One. Aerodynamically, we would certainly hope to see four or five per cent improvement through the year. We're trying to make those improvements and at the same time, catch up with what went wrong over the winter. So it's just sheer hard work and a lot of honesty, I think.

How much is it going to take for you to catch the two teams at the front?
PS: A lot, particularly McLaren. They really are showing class on every sort of track. I won't say it's impossible, nothing's impossible, but it will be very difficult to catch that back up during the course of this season.

And the tyre differences, have you got over that initial problem?
PS: I'm not sure we had that much of an initial problem. It is true to say that when we first put the Bridgestone tyre on our car, we suffered in performance whereas some other teams suffered less and in one case, maybe even – in relative terms – improved. I'm certainly happy that we're using the tyre well as a tyre. I'm not completely sure we fully understand it aerodynamically, but I think we're pretty damn close now.

Can you just clarify that: aerodynamically? A tyre is a big black round thing as we're frequently told…
PS: Exactly, it's a big black round thing, whizzing round in the air.

So what's the difference between last year's big black round thing and this year's big black round thing?
PS: They are very, very different shapes. The aerodynamics of a modern Formula One car are incredibly subtle, as you see from the various appendages on the car. Certainly, with Michelin, we worked a lot on the aerodynamics of the tyres, with very, very small changes to shape, to shoulders, to sidewalls etc, to tune the tyre aerodynamics in conjunction with the car aerodynamics. Now we're dealing with a different animal.

Willy, you're obviously in a very difficult position; you're obviously trying very hard to make up the gap to the two teams in front but everybody behind you is aiming at you, they all want to be third. How does that feel from your point of view?
WR: First it feels quite good, because it's the first time we are the third strongest team. We are definitely aiming to move even further forward and to see if with our development it is possible to beat one of the teams in front. They are currently maintaining the gap and McLaren is even pulling away a bit, but that still has to be our aim, to try to beat them.

Surely that would be a long way ahead of your target at the beginning of the season?
WR: Over the winter time, the target was to improve from our fifth position in the World Championship to move forward. We saw from the beginning of the season that we are the third strongest team. We take this position and I don't think we should aim for just protecting P4. I think it is P3 currently and hopefully even better.