Flavio Briatore Q&A
Flavio Briatore celebrated the first anniversary of his return to Benetton in Brazil, and Giancarlo Fisichella responded by giving the team a sixth place finish. The high attrition rate helped, but it was a good, charging drive by the Italian. Both Giancarlo and team mate Jenson Button have been out of the limelight so far this year, as the team has struggled to get the new Renault engine to work. The decision to race rather than develop it this year was a logical one at the time, but as the season goes on Benetton may come to regret not running a parallel development programme while racing a less radical unit. However, it could pay dividends next year, when the cars will be yellow and the Renault name makes a fulltime return. Adam Cooper spoke to Briatore about the season so far
"No, it's been terrible, not difficult! We decided to go on this road, and we believe it's the best road to develop new technology in the engine. The worst thing is when you start something and you stop. It's not these kind of results that make me feel bad, honestly. All the team was aware, the drivers were aware, that Renault would be back in F1 in 2002. This year would be the preparation. It is a bit frustrating, but it's part of our decision."
"This is not a problem, this is only improving the team. At this moment we have a very specific problem and we're working very hard to get a solution for this problem. We don't know at this point how the car is, because when you go slow every car looks good! We have plenty of work to do to be in good shape for the end of the season."
"I think it's possible to make some progress. We know the plan, and I believe in the middle of the season we will be better."
"The team is much better, and absolutely it's ready to be up there. You saw the race in Malaysia, where we did the first pit stop. The team is really together. We have all the ingredients that we need to cook now, and we have the chef ready to go, and everything else ready to go, but we need a little bit of time to make sure the ingredients are correct. It looks like nobody's working hard, but I've never worked so hard in this team."
"Yes. In 1999 when we first decided to take over Benetton, Renault always said '2002.' There was one reason, because we believed we had this new kind of technology, but we need to suffer a little bit. It's like anything in life - if you want to go out with a nice, nice beautiful woman you need to spend more time! But we'll make it, no worries"
"I'm very pleased. It was a very nice race for us, and I was pleased as well with the times Giancarlo was doing in the race. It was quite surprising after the disaster of the warm-up. We did everything perfectly, the pit stops and everything else, but unfortunately when we stopped we missed the rain by three laps. Otherwise it would have been bingo! We missed the third place by those three laps. But anyway, it was good for the morale, and honestly Giancarlo's engine wasn't so bad during the race. Jenson had a problem with the engine, which we need to investigate, but as I say this point is very important for the morale of everybody."
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