Feature: Saturday Hero Seeks to Star on Sunday

Juan Pablo Montoya has got the folks at Ferrari sounding as curious as his Formula One fans.

For the last five races the Colombian Williams driver has started on pole position, standing out as the king of qualifying. Three more successive poles and he will have equalled the late Brazilian Ayrton Senna's record of eight.

Yet never on Sunday, at least so far this season, has he managed to translate his Saturday heroics into race day success. The question is why?

Is Montoya overachieving in qualifying, doing a superhuman job in regularly pushing Ferrari's Michael Schumacher aside, or underachieving on race day?

Is the car possibly too powerful for its own good, better equipped to manage its tyres on a flying lap than over a full race distance?

Have Williams got their race strategy wrong? And why, if the car is clearly so fast in qualifying trim, has Montoya's teammate Ralf Schumacher so far failed to put his Williams on pole this season yet been an early winner in Malaysia?

Brawn Surprised

Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn would love a clear answer to some of those questions, even if his cars have been dominant all season.

"I guess I am pleasantly surprised," he said when questioned about whether he had expected Montoya's race record to be so much weaker than his qualifying. "It is a little difficult to understand.

"Are they (Williams) exceptionally quick in qualifying or are they poor in racing? Which one is it? It's difficult for us to understand which one it is because certainly they haven't converted the qualifying pace into racing.

"And vice-versa, if you look at their race pace they're going exceptionally quick in qualifying.

"So whether they have an approach, or he (Montoya) has an approach, where he can get the car set-up in a certain way to use the tyres in a certain way, and for that one lap he is able to produce a very impressive performance, is something we're thinking over.

"It's something we will probably devote a bit more time to ourselves later this year once testing starts again, we want to see if there's some other way of approaching qualifying to get more performance," added Brawn.

The Briton said Ferrari regularly test with more fuel in the car than needed for just one flying lap and suggested that they might try testing on low fuel loads to improve qualifying performance.

Question of Luck

Montoya, never short of confidence, has no doubts that he is doing the business. He suffered engine failures in Monaco and Canada, an accident at the European Grand Prix and was third and then fourth in Britain and France respectively.

There is no doubt that the Colombian feels the team have made mistakes but are working hard to resolve them.

"We'll see what happens here," he said at the German Grand Prix. "I think the team has been thinking really hard about it and trying to figure out a way to solve the problems. There's quite good ideas we've got here and I think it might change things a bit.

"The tyre is part of the issue, yes...but I think the poles are more surprising than the (lack of a) win. The win has been bad luck and to win sometimes you don't need to be the fastest but the luckiest.

"You need things to fall your way. Look at Kimi (Raikkonen's) last race," he said referring to McLaren's young Finn who led the French Grand Prix until making a mistake five laps from the end.

"He had it in his pocket, threw it away."