Adrian Newey Q&A

"Overall it was a good pragmatic result. We're a bit disappointed because Kimi had the pace to win it, and he spent the whole race pretty much stuck behind one Williams or the other. When he did have some free air then it looked like he was going to do it, but he got stuck in traffic."



"Arguably we could have called him in one lap earlier, which would have helped in the Villeneuve one. But we weren't to know that he was going to get blocked so badly."



"That's as far as we could run."



"It's a difficult one. Monaco is quite a low weight effect, so that says put more fuel in. But equally qualifying is of paramount importance, so that says take the fuel out. So it was a particularly difficult judgement. We were obviously one of the early ones, although Williams went before us, and Ferrari in particular went quite long."



"I must admit it was a bit longer than expected."



"We were a bit unlucky there. We expected that Renault would stop earlier, and that Trulli would stop a couple of laps earlier than David. That would have allowed us to get David past him. But as it happened Trulli was able to stretch it out to the same lap, and then we got the double whammy of Trulli holding David up while Alonso was still out there."



"Yes, he did a very good job. He was very cautious in Friday qualifying, perhaps overly cautious, as he realised afterwards. But he wanted to keep it tidy all weekend, and he obviously did that. His qualifying lap on Saturday was pretty awesome, considering that he was out early and the track wasn't as good as it was at the end."



"It's difficult to know. It always depends on the weather conditions. It's quite a power circuit, so I expect you'll see some fairly impressive top speeds from Ferrari and Williams!"



"Well, that's the target, the earliest available target that we could make. Having said that it depends on how it goes at Barcelona and Jerez. If the car runs smoothly and shows its reliability and performance potential, then yes, we'll race it at Nurburgring. If it doesn't, we won't."



"We only really got going on the final day at Paul Ricard, and by then the circuit was configured for Montreal. We had Pedro de la Rosa in the other car, so we had no reference point, we'd never run on that circuit before, and the cars were on quite different wing levels, because we hadn't got Montreal wings for the new car. So it was really rather difficult to say anything."



"It's obviously good that we've managed to still be leading the championship seven races in."



"If I'm honest, yes. At the end of last year I don't think we could expect to be leading Ferrari seven races in with a development of last year's car. I think it's a credit to everybody at McLaren, the way we've managed to develop the car, and indeed to Michelin, for what they've done."



"As you say, I don't think it will just be eight races."



"It's difficult to say whether it will become standard. But I'll be surprised if we have a brand new car out at the start of next year. Certainly we haven't started planning anything yet. I refuse to start planning or starting work on a new car until we've raced this one!"



"Well, you could, but the chances are it won't have enough of a performance benefit to be able to justify it."