Mario Theissen Q&A

"Today we had as many problems in one race as you normally have in a whole season! Juan Pablo's engine died the moment he actuated the clutch, and I don't know the exact reason so far. The second problem was Ralf at the second start - the car was not ready to go. So he had to follow the whole field. Then we had an engine failure [with Juan Pablo]. I don't know the reason so far, if the cause was in the engine, or some peripheral thing like the oil circuit or something like this. We had a pit stop with a tyre gun that didn't work, and through the whole race the car was too slow, just too slow. If you add this up, you end up with zero points."



"I don't know. At the moment I was on my way from the grid to the garage, and I still don't know what happened."



"Every problem can be solved, and only a top team is able to solve all the problems. Today was a clear indication about what we said all this season. We are not a top team yet. We have days when we are top like yesterday [in qualifying]. But a top team is prepared to deliver every day at every track, and there's quite a way to go for us."



"Well, from what I saw the car certainly was slow on the straight, slower than expected, and we have to talk about the car set-up."



"I would say this is a question you should ask Patrick!"

Q

"That was really impressive, what they did today. Apparently the whole package has made a big step forward. I don't know how far it is related to the engine or to the car, but altogether it was quite impressive."



"No. I think even here the engine was not the biggest factor. There were some quite significant power differences between the engines, but if you look where the cars were in the race, it's clear that one single detail of engine concept can never decide about competitiveness of the whole team and the whole car."



Generally I am very confident of course. We have to do a lot of work now after today, to "make sure that this doesn't happen again. I said several times you can only win if everything is right. To me it's better if on one occasion nothing is right, than to have four races once with tyres not optimum, once with the car, once with the engine and once with the driver. So I hope this was everything we have to take this season!"