10/03/2006
NEWS STORY
Jean Todt: "It's always quite an emotional moment when the cars go out on the first day of practice of a new season. New engines (2.4 litre V8), new teams, new drivers and many unanswered questions: one can't get an answer after just two hours of free practice but on Sunday evening we'll definitely have a clearer picture. Today we worked mainly on the set-up of the 248 F1, starting from the information we'd gathered from the testing we did here in February. All in all, we can say that the first indications are fairly encouraging."
Michael Schumacher: "It's been a fairly positive day for us. We've completed the programme that we had planned for ourselves and we worked well, so I'm obviously satisfied with the way things went. I think that, compared to the other teams, we are looking competitive but in order to see whether we really are quick enough to aim for the top, we need to wait till everybody is running on low fuel and with new tyres. I still reckon that there are four teams capable of winning even if today perhaps some of them didn't want to reveal all their potential: what is clear however is that Renault seem to be very quick straight out of the box which gives them an edge."
Felipe Massa: "Towards the end of the second practice session I managed to find a good set-up for the car. In the first session and during the first part of the second one we were not really able to extract all the potential out of the car. I think that I could have set an even better time but on the whole I'm satisfied with what we've achieved so far because I feel that we now have a good foundation on which we can build in preparation for tomorrow's qualifying and the race on Sunday."
Ross Brawn: "I think we found the balance of the car fairly quickly, obviously we had the benefits of the test because we'd done a lot of running here during the last few weeks. The track seems to be pretty similar to where we were with the test so that's encouraging. The tyres seem quite consistent. We had a little problem with some flat-spotting on Felipe's car. He's got some issues with the brakes we need to fix but towards the end of the second session we think we found a good balance from which to develop the car from now on. I think we're in reasonable shape at the moment. If we can keep everything together tomorrow we should have a good race."