Pole winner's conference: Hakkinen

Q. Congratulations, Mika, on your second pole position of the season. How was qualifying?

Mika Hakkinen: It went well - and I am happy with the final result. But we have been trying various different setups, yesterday and again this morning, and there have been some radical changes. That's why I haven't been able to feel 100 per cent confident with the car in any of the sessions. When we made another big modification immediately before qualifying this afternoon, I started to feel more and more comfortable, and we were going faster and faster all the time. But even then we still haven't reached the maximum performance. Obviously yesterday's rain didn't help our programme. But finishing first makes me feel alright.

Q. The gap between you and David is pretty small this year. Will he be a threat?

Mika Hakkinen: Certainly. It was an exciting qualifying session, and Rubens was also going flat out and performing extremely well. In the very last section, corner 12, he was only one-tenth slower than us. But as I said, we have been making improvements to the car all through the session, so I knew I would able to go quicker and quicker. So although I knew about the threat all the time, but there was always something in reserve.

Q. Which other competitor do you fear most?

Mika Hakkinen: Tomorrow's race is 72 laps. That is the biggest threat.

Q. Does that mean you are still worried about reliability?

Mika Hakkinen: All through my career, whenever I have had a good position on the grid, there has always been extra worry about the things that might go wrong. You just have to put them out of your mind. At the moment the team has the benefit of some very good testing and they have discovered all the problems that we had in the first race. At the end of the day I don't feel under any pressure that the car is going to break down. We will only know the truth at the end of tomorrow.

Q. With the gaps so small, are you expecting a harder race than one year ago?

Mika Hakkinen: Probably. Also, the revised pit entrance and exit will probably influence our tactics for the race. We just have to wait and see.