Pierre Dupasquier Q&A

"It was difficult. Before the first stint of the race we did not know anything about what should happen. So we were not worried, but concerned about the new conditions. Running 23 seconds flat-out is new in F1 for us, and we were just anxious a little bit to see what would happen. In the morning the cars were overly over-steering. The teams widely corrected for it, and it was not too bad in the race. It was OK, and Juan Pablo was dominating the race when he had to stop."



"Yes, I think so. Depending on the balance of the car. Some tyres were a little bit out, but you can still see the grooves. Here we started on scrubbed tyres, which is more stable. The first five to 10 laps of a set of tyres are not constant, particularly because of the grooves. Without grooves, it's different. With grooves, you don't expect your tyres to be constant. In the slick time the fastest time was the first, second or third timed lap. Then there was no way to get something out of a set of tyres."



"When you have a new set of tyres, they are absolutely identical. The proof of that is when those guys use four sets in qualifying, they never complain about the different sets. They are within a few hundredths of seconds. Then tyres you prepare for the race are suffering from warm down cycles. Definitely for us its critical... It really does introduce differences into sets of tyres. It's true, they're not the same. So part of the challenge for the team is to select the right set of tyres."



"No, I don't think so. We were good with the tyres that particularly Williams selected. It was the same type of tyre that Irvine used, and he did more than 50 laps!"



"No. Again the treaded tyres give us a completely different story. It won't help."



"Not really. We'll try to put our head in our hands and try to summarise what we've learned during the season, and try to deal with it. We know by experience that it's a track which can be not easy to understand different results. In motorcycles in particular sometimes we were absolutely out of the picture."



"Good, we'd like that!"



"In Suzuka, that's the point. You saw in Spa that we were doing pretty well, so we'll see. We've improved, and we'll probably improve significantly for next year. But it's more an improvement in understanding what we have to do than to do things. We have good rain tyres in every discipline."



"We'll see. But in deep water the race is behind the pace car, so it's not a true concern!"