Eddie Irvine Q&A

"Honestly, I don't know. I don't get that excited, and I don't know why I don't get that excited. I'm a miserable bastard, maybe! I'm only thinking of how we're going to do better. We weren't going to beat the McLarens, and we weren't going to beat the Ferraris. We might have beaten Ralf, which is a good step forward."



"He said 'It's a long time since I've seen you up here,' or something like that! So welcome back. I think I've been on the podium four times in five years here. That's quite satisfying."



"In the morning the car felt good, and I was running with a lot of fuel on, and I was second fastest. So I thought we'd be able to run quickly. And then in the race we had this problem with the power steering again. The engineers can see it now; it was there last year, but they didn't see it. This year Pedro complained about the same thing, and I complained about it, and now they see it. So hopefully we can do something about it."



"Yeah. I tried to go round the outside of Ralf at the first corner. Montoya pushed Ralf wide, and then I had to back off and he got ahead of me. I had to be conservative because it was a long race, and I didn't think the Williams guys would run longer than me. So I just had to be close enough whenever they pitted. Montoya looked as if he was bit light."



"No. At that stage I was just cruising, because there was no point in being up their arse, because I wasn't going to go anywhere. So I just dropped back, got my own space, and just plodded round."



"It would swing up and down, up and down. Then the power steering problems started getting worse and worse, and he started edging away. Then all of a sudden he started coming back to me again, and I wasn't going any quicker, so he was in trouble."



"We didn't have to pit when we pitted..."



"I was just minding him!"



"It's good, it's four points and it gets us ahead of Benetton, it gets us ahead of Arrows, and we should be beating them. But this is a weirdo circuit, so it really doesn't mean anything. It's good that we were on the podium here in Monaco, that's where Jaguar should be on the podium. It's right for Formula One. But Canada is where we'll find out if we've made the step forward we think we have, or not. That will tell us more about how the rest of the season's going to go."



"It's an efficiency race, and Monaco is a downforce race. We had a lot more downforce here, and the thing is it's all for free, so it's a very big step in efficiency as well."