Jean Todt: First of all, I would like to ask for a minute's silence after the incident yesterday of Colin McRae, his son and his friends.
Thank you. Unfortunately, these kind of things allows us to give more importance to real things.
It has been an intense week since we last met in Monza, where we were definitely not happy about the result because we have been dominated. Because Felipe had, one more time this season, a reliability problem. And I must say, it has been a tough week, very heavy, first with the hearing of the FIA with the decisions you all know so far.
I waited until tonight to make some comments and answer some of your eventual questions. It's very difficult to say we are happy, we are unhappy. Something which was very important after the hearing of 26th of July, if you are guilty you must be penalised. Our main competitor has been recognised, after new evidence, guilty, and has been penalised with a soft penalisation, losing points for the Manufacturers' Championship. If you get deeply into all this sad story, you realise that it's a very soft sentence, which we respect.
Today, it's no meaning to speak about the Drivers' Championship because we know our major competitor still has time to make an appeal, and we will wait for their decision to be able to comment about that.
Since Friday we had a feeling that we would be strong. It was not a surprise to be strong with the specification of our car, and since we started on Friday morning, we were competitive. Yesterday it was a very tight qualifying where it was very small gap between Kimi and Felipe. Both did a fantastic race today and it was great to have the seventh win of the season, four for Kimi, three for Felipe. And now we are three races to the end of the championship and as I've said for a long time, we will do the utmost that we can to be competitive and to try to win the next three races. We know it's difficult but that's what we are going to try.
Do you concede that the championship points totals favour Kimi more than Felipe and that it will be beneficial for Ferrari to perhaps use their support more to push Kimi towards the McLaren drivers than Felipe?
JT: I'm not surprised at the question. First of all, I think it will be very important to see if they make an appeal or not, to see if they make the appeal or if they don't make the appeal. Because if we would have the chance of them doing the appeal, I think it will change quite a lot on the drivers' situation. So then, probably the appeal will be judged before the Japanese Grand Prix and we may be facing a completely different situation. Before we know about the appeal, it's not something I'm going to comment on further.
Technically, we don't understand why your car is so competitive on certain circuits. It seems that your car is better suited to the very smooth surfaces like Istanbul, like here and Magny Cours, and that McLaren are better on more bumpy circuits. Is that right?
JT: With all respect for the competitivity of their car, I feel that we have been more competitive this year. Simply we haven't been reliable enough. It's easy to analyse each race. They didn't stop once for reliability (reasons) and we stopped many times. We are paying the costs of it. But otherwise, all put together, we know that in certain conditions - and it's something I already mentioned last week - at Monte Carlo, Canada, Indianapolis and Monza - we have not been very competitive, or it was what we feel was a lack of mechanical grip and not enough performance on kerbs. So we are definitely going to pay big attention to that in next year's car but we cannot re-design our car for the end of the season.
If McLaren do make an appeal, would you expect the World Council to re-assess the decision to allow them to keep their drivers' points?
JT: I started to say that they have had a very soft penalty considering the whole matter. In a tribunal appeal, you have only lawyers. If you take the legal case... but I cannot say what will be the result of the appeal, if there will be an appeal. But if you ask me, what they will do, personally I wish they will do. I think the result should be different. But again, it's a personal feeling.
Jean, will you do anything to further the cause of maybe making a stiffer penalty or are you finished? Will Ferrari pursue the matter further to make the penalty worse for McLaren?
JT: No. As I said, it's not a question... I had this question already one week ago. It's not a menu: 'we like, we don't like'. We respect, we feel it's a soft penalty considering the whole story but we as Ferrari are not going...
What was very important for us, as I mentioned before, is that if you are guilty, you must have a penalisation, so they were guilty, they had a penalisation. Now you can always decide enough, not enough. We feel it's soft and if you speak...
I know that yesterday the president of the FIA said that he confirmed that it was soft but we know in this business you have a lot of things taken into consideration and I can understand that. It's much better to have four races, including this one, with all the drivers and all that, and I'm not arguing about that, but lots of things were taken into consideration in order to favourise more the championship rather than this single bad case.
