Patrick Head Q&A

For the second successive race Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya found themselves running nose to tail with the quicker man waiting patiently behind. Montoya has shown time and again this year how good he is at passing, and to his credit so far he's resisted the temptation to embark on a risky move where his team mate is concerned.

However, team orders have not been able to help him, and it will be interesting to see what happens if there's a third occurrence in the near future... Adam Cooper asked technical director Patrick Head for his thoughts on Sunday's British Grand Prix.



"For Juan it was quite good until after his first stop when he came up behind Ralf, who was towards the end of his long run on the one-stop strategy. I don't think there was any deliberate attempt by Ralf to hold Juan back, but when we radioed Ralf to say we thought it would be better if he let Juan by, Ralf said, 'I'm faster than Rubens, I won't have a problem overtaking him.' But as the next five laps showed obviously he did have a problem overtaking him."



"It's an important one for us to sort out, yes."



"Obviously there are discussions and conversations and a fair and open exchange of views..."



"Because I think it was a very close run thing between the two. As you see, Mika on the front row on the grid was able to run a very fast two-stop strategy. But when you're eighth and 10th on the grid, to adopt the two-stop strategy you've got to be able to run at your speed, which means that you mustn't have somebody with a one-stop ahead of you. As it was we thought we could make a start, and as you saw there was the bump on David with Trulli on the first corner, who seems to do that rather often."



"For Trulli to interfere with one of the championship contenders is unacceptable, and it certainly has made things very difficult for David. Anyway, Juan found himself in third position, without being held up by anybody. We couldn't have predicted it was exactly going to be like that, so it was a very close call between one and two stops."



"Each driver was happy with the choice that they made, yes."



"He stopped quite a long way out of position, and he knew he'd stopped out of position, and was shaking his head, because he's very meticulous about being precise with his stops. That means the guys who were ready with their guns had to move, and they had to move nearly three-quarters of a metre [we think Patrick means two feet!]. And obviously that slows the stop down. There's nothing much you can do about it once he's stopped out of the position."



"Obviously with the rain on Saturday morning we really didn't have particularly good data. We could have run either tyre in truth, but we decided to go for the safer, harder tyre. We knew it was going to be a little bit warmer on race day, and the tyre was fine."



"That was part of the problem, and maybe car set-up as well was a problem."



"You play to what you can achieve at any place. We knew this was not going to be one of our better races, and obviously we qualified eighth and 10th. And I think that had the strategy been played out, we had the potential to finish third and fourth in the race here. We didn't realise it in one case because of a mechanical failure, and the other because of what happened on the track."