Interview with Renault's Pat Symonds

But it soon all went wrong for the world champion, when a change of front intermediates at the first stop proved to be the wrong choice. Unable to get the tyres working properly he fell back into the clutches of teammate Giancarlo Fisichella and, much worse, Michael Schumacher.

When a mistake at his second pitstop cost Alonso even more time, his fate was sealed and Schumacher's opportunistic victory means the two drivers are now tied on points at the head of the world championship.

After an afternoon where Renault unusually snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, autosport.com heard from the team's director of engineering Pat Symonds about what went wrong, why it happened and what the team's mood is like heading to Japan.

Q. There were a couple of critical points in deciding that race against you. One was changing Fernando's front tyres, and the other was the problem at the second pitstop. Can you explain us through what happened?

Pat Symonds: Okay. The front tyre thing first. Obviously performance in that first stint was fantastic. Fernando on the radio was saying that he was worried about his left front tyre, he said it was a total slick, and there was obviously no way to go onto dry tyres at that stage. And to be honest we didn't know when we would be able to go onto slicks, because it was hard to judge, wasn't it?

Q. Yes. There were some people before the start saying it could go dry as early as lap 15?

PS: We didn't think that. He stopped on lap 22 so we were already at that stage, 15 or so, when we were talking about it. And he was getting more and more concerned, and he did describe it as a slick. So we planned our second stop at lap 42 and just felt that there was no way he was going to do another 20 laps on that tyre.

We knew that if we changed to new tyres it would not be as good, but to be honest I thought that it would not be as good for just a few laps. With a 20-second lead I wasn't too bothered about that, though. I was much more concerned about getting up to lap 40 and actually then having a dangerous tyre on the car. So I thought if we changed them we will only change the fronts. We would then only have four or five laps where it would be tricky, but does that matter when you are 20 seconds clear?

The reality was that, well firstly the performance loss from the graining was worse than I thought, but even more particularly it went on so much longer than I thought. In fact, it didn't really stop. It sort of looked like, just before we went to dries, that it was starting to go, but when I looked at the tyre I'm not sure that just wasn't just the track drying out because the tyre looked awful, absolutely awful.

We stopped again on lap 35 and we were just waiting for the earliest that we could get onto dry tyres. Robert Kubica was the first on and I thought that was quite brave, and optimistically hoped that it would be okay, but he showed us that you couldn't go early. I think we got the right lap to do it, but that is not because we judged it but because we were so desperate to get on there. It was about right I think; I don't think we were too early. I don't think we could have gone on any earlier than that.

So that is basically why we did it. In retrospect, we didn't have to do 20 laps on that first tyre anyway and we could have got onto the slicks earlier, and actually when I saw the tyre it wasn't a slick. It was useable. But what can you do in that situation?

Fernando makes good judgement calls and in a situation like that I have full confidence in his calls and we will generally go with them. This time it wasn't right, but that doesn't mean I am blaming him because ultimately it is our responsibility to get it right. What happened certainly surprised me. I knew it wasn't going to be great, but I didn't think it was going to be that bad.

Q. What about the problem with the right rear tyre at the second stop?

PS: Well, we have gone through the video. Basically what happened was that the wheel nut came out of the gun and the guy didn't see the wheel nut come out, he didn't realise it wasn't there, so when he tried to gun it back on it there was nothing there. If you look at the video, I think we lost 8.75 seconds through it with reaction time, but overall we lost about 10 seconds. It is one of those things.

Q. When Giancarlo Fisichella and Michael Schumacher had closed up on Fernando during that second stint, was any consideration given to just holding station at the front to keep the Ferrari behind?

PS: Yeah, there was. It is a difficult situation to judge that, because Fisi had actually had a little bit of graining in the first stint, but in that second stint he was flying. He was really, really quick. I think all the time, I guess it is my ridiculous optimism shining through, but I kept on thinking that the next lap the graining was going to clean off and Fernando was going to start get going. So it was terribly difficult to judge what to do. It really was a hard one that.

Q. What sort of weather information were you getting?

PS: Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. There is just nothing here. We don't subscribe to the Meteo France system, because we normally bring our own weathermen. But we couldn't afford to bring them to these last three. So all I could look at was the airport stuff really, and the airport information had changed in the morning from rain and mist to just mist. So I was sort of expecting it to be better rather than worse, but it is not the quality of information we normally work with.

Q. Do you think not having your usual level of information could have made a difference, in terms of judging whether it was going to be dry?

PS: As it happens, no. Based on that I was expecting it to become dry rather than to rain again, and to be honest additional weather information would not have helped in trying to judge when that could be. It took a long while didn't it, but we have seen that before in qualifying.

Q. Was the timing of Fisichella's final stop in reaction to Ferrari's, or was that when he was going to stop anyway?

PS: That was when he was going to stop anyway. We were wondering about whether we should bring him in a lap earlier and see what happened.

Q. But it's a tricky one to call because you don't know whether you get more advantage from hot tyres or not?

PS: Exactly. And losing the lead as he came out was an inevitability. It is one of the reasons I don't want tyre warmers, because that is the sort of thing you will see all the time when there are no tyre warmers. It makes it more exciting.

Q. Points-wise this race was good for Michael, but pace wise Fernando should have walked it without the tyre issue. Is that a consolation?

PS: That is what I would like to come away with from a terribly disappointing day. Under all conditions we were bloody quick. If it had been a totally dry race and totally dry qualifying then I think you would probably have seen Fernando and Michael on the front row. And I think we would have had a great race and I think we would probably have won it.

There are no certainties, but considering that I said to some of you guys in the days leading up to the race that the headline results of the last few weeks have not shown that, but I was quietly confident we had got ourselves to that position. So I am really pleased that today we have seen the justification to that, even if we managed to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Q. Do you see that form being carried forward to the last two races?

PS: Well, I think in terms of form for the last two races what you can see is that the raw performance of the Renault has moved up a bit. We have got through our problems of getting the car back to where it was before the mass dampers went, and once again I would say there is very, very little difference between ourselves and Ferrari. So as I have said so many times before this year, that comes down to the tyre thing. The car that has the better tyres on the day is going to win.

Q. How do you judge the wet tyres? Because the same Bridgestone tyre that left them depressed after Saturday helped them win the race?

PS: When it was wet, really wet, I think the Michelin was very superior. But just as we had seen the signs in Hungary, as it dries out, just before you get the slick, the Bridgestone becomes a bit better than the Michelin.

Q. A lot has been made in recent years about team orders in Formula One, and how they are banned. Was there any hesitation in letting Fernando get past Giancarlo?

PS: Again, we cannot give team orders as such. We cannot get on the radio and say, do this, do that. What we do is we pre-brief the drivers of what is expected in certain circumstances, so we don't have to get involved. They are good guys and they know what it is all about.

Q. What is the mood ahead of Suzuka?

PS: Give me an hour or two to calm down, and it will be pretty good I think. I am massively disappointed with today, I really feel that we let ourselves down. In these circumstances it is not a question of hanging anyone, it just happened. But as I said earlier, the great thing to see is that we are right back on the pace and we can beat them.

I think the car will be fabulous at Suzuka. It was so good at the British Grand Prix (which has similar car demands) and we were back testing at Silverstone, doing Suzuka tyres, a couple of weeks ago and it was lovely. If the car is good at Silverstone then it will be good at Suzuka. We feel very good about Suzuka and we have had some pretty nice races at Brazil in the last few years. So it is another circuit where I feel we will be quite good.

I am not going to say that we are going there and it is going to be easy, because they are going to hard fights, but they are also going to be good fights. If anything, it is a minute amount, but I feel that we might just have the upper hand in terms of raw performance. In the dry in the race I think we had it. Michael obviously wasn't pushing all the time, but he was pushing enough for us to see where things were.

Q. You have said all year that you thought it was going to be a really close championship, you even predicted that in Bahrain. But did you think that it was going to be this close, this late in the season?

PS: I suppose I did, because I honestly thought it had every chance of going to the last race or the last but one race. It is going to go like that, so I suppose so. Probably there was a point mid-season where I thought it was getting a bit easier than I thought at the beginning of the year, but those initial thoughts were probably better!