Jock Clear Q&A

"Obviously, it was very much down to good luck and people dropping out, but we know this circuit is a car breaker. We were reliable and looked after our tyres well, and engine performed perfectly through the race. And in the warm-up we were quick. We didn't know where the speed came from, but we were genuinely quick with a lot of fuel in the morning, so we really did think that we could have a good race. As I say we relied on a lot of people having some bad luck, but ultimately we were quick enough to keep where we were and look after our position, not put ourselves under pressure and get to the end. And that's what it's all about at Hockenheim."



"Exactly, yes. Obviously Olivier was on two stops and Jacques was on one, so Jacques knew that Olivier was going to be a little bit quicker than him, and was going to be able to pressure Trulli a bit more. Obviously the double team technique on Trulli fazed him enough to put him into a bit of a spin. It worked perfectly. You don't plan those things, but..."



"I think it's all down to how good your start is, or how bad your start is. If you get a good start and you're in clear water, it works. You can look at it and say if Jacques had been on two stops he might have done better, because he got a nice clean start and probably could have got past Trulli a lot easier if he was on two stops. Who knows? But obviously Olivier got a bad start and was back in 14th. From there you've already lost too much, and that's the risk of two stops."



"I know people have had problems with blisters this weekend. Bridgestone went was risky as they could on the tyre compound here, and some people were damaging tyres. We weren't - we had a few blisters on Friday, but generally no problems at all. And during the race we had no problems. But Jacques always looks after the tyres well. If you look back to '97, as a driver he's good at looking after tyres, so we figured that was an advantage of ours anyway."



"We started on ex-qualifying tyres, and put a new set on at the stop. We didn't lose a set of new tyres at the restart, we just put another set of qualifying tyres back on. It made no difference to us at all."



"We obviously looked at the set of tyres we took off, and they had no punctures or anything, and we had no damage at all to the car."



"Jacques was quite angry because obviously he figures it was stopped because Michael was out, and people wanted to make a race of it. At the end of the day this is a sport and we're there to entertain people. If that's part of the entertainment it's not for us to decide. What I do think is slightly contrasting in that view is that having had an accident at the start, if you then have a restart you are risking a similar thing again. The fact was we were all in line astern behind the safety car. You could confidently say that everybody is now safe for the rest of the race from that point of view. You have a restart, and who knows what's going to happen again. But it's not my decision and I didn't have all the information, and for sure they had more information than I do. In hindsight it was the best decision they could have made. And who knows where we would have finished if we'd not had a restart? So great decision!"



"Obviously at Silverstone we damaged ourselves on Olivier's car at the very first corner, and limped round with a pretty damaged car. Here it was very close when Trulli spun, but the car was good all race."