Q & A with Heikki Kovalainen

Heikki Kovalainen: I am much better today. We had the first day, which I guess was pretty bad for Nelson. Then on my first day we did 86 laps, and yesterday all I did was waiting! Obviously we waited the whole day and then came the rain. Today we managed to do all the work and we did pretty much what we wanted to do. So in the end it was good. And today we have made some good progress.

Q: Did you manage to do a good tyre evaluation?

HK: Not only the tyre evaluation but good setup work as well. I think we are clearly working well with the tyres now. I think the pace is better. It is not easy to say what other people are doing, but we had a good day.

Q: What do you think of the difference between the two tyres?

HK: There is a little bit of the difference but it is something we can cope with. The performance and the balance change is not so big. We can live with it.

Q: Do you still need more work on the qualifying setup?

HK: That has been the main issue. I think today we made a good progress. We made a significant change to the balance and we found a good direction. We can be more confident going into the race than before, but still we need to keep pushing.

I am happy today though. Even though it was a difficult test, everyone was so focused and yes, the weather spoilt a bit yesterday.

Q: You did learn how the track changes over time from wet to dry, though, didn't you?

HK: Yes, absolutely. We did a bit of running in the wet too, which I have not had a lot of this winter with these tyres. So it was good in that way.

Q: It dries quickly here too, doesn't it?

HK: If the conditions are going to be like this here for the race, then you have to be very accurate with the strategy. I think we have some reference now. It is still not 100% accurate, but if it rains and then it becomes sunny, we have some data we can look at. Hopefully that will help us.

Q: Looking back on Melbourne, do you just want to forget about it and move on?

HK: No, I just learned from it. It sounded a bigger disaster than it really was. It was not the result that I wanted, and on my part there were lots of mistakes in the race. It all started from the practice and I did not do a good enough lap in qualifying.

It is behind me now. I have to learn from the mistakes and we just move forward. It did not go well as a debut, but at the end of the day I still finished the race. There were some positive things about the race. I did learn many things during the race.

I have to make sure the same mistakes do not happen again. We want a different kind of start next weekend, so that we can get a momentum being carried through to Saturday and Sunday. That is all...