Pat Symonds Q&A

"Yes, I think so. I'm not usually optimistic coming to a circuit because of the results of the previous year. I regard us as a team that can be competitive on any circuit. But to start eighth and 20th on the grid, there's not much you can do from there! Fernando made really good progress up to the first stop. I thought we were stuck there, so we decided to switch him to a two-stop. But we lost a lot of performance after that second stop."



"The numbers don't add up for weight. I don't know. We had some understeer, but I'm not going to blame the tyres, because the tyres looked okay. But it didn't come off."



"A similar thing, really. He had a pretty regular race, and it's hard to be creative when everyone's pretty well doing the same thing. But again he seemed to get this understeer in the middle of the race, which I'm at a bit of a loss to explain at the moment."



"It seems that way. With Jarno we even left the front tyres on at the second stop because of the understeer. It just made no difference at all."



"Everyone was on the 'X' tyre, apart from Jenson. It looked like a really nice tyre."



"We haven't had good performance on it in testing, so we didn't bring it."



"It looked like he hit Jenson. I'm all for people hitting each other!"



"It's different to Malaysia. Before we really looked at things we assumed it was going to be a similar [Herrmann] Tilke circuit, but there are subtle differences. I'm not going to say too much about them, because maybe we've done our work better than others, or maybe we haven't. It is quite different. We'll see what happens."



"Probably not. I've asked Michelin to bring some Paris-Dakar tyres, as they seem quite good on the sand..."