Q & A with Sebastien Bourdais

Sebastien Bourdais: The balance was quite satisfying and when you feel good in the car and feel confident then you can deliver. If you are struggling and fighting the car all the time then nothing is happening. When it is counter-nature it is never positive.

For sure you can attribute it to the track characteristics at Spa. Most of the corners were between 150-180kph, so you target the balance for these corners and the rest you forget about it. The car quite instantly was properly balanced in most of the corners and the first and the last one we had a lot of wheel locking issues and stuff like that, but the team found a little trick to improve this and then as soon as we fixed the problem then we started to talk.

Q. You openly admit that you have struggled on low speed corners. So was Spa about the setup or simply that you are better on the faster tracks?

SB: The setup was the same, but the downforce was different. It was a medium downforce level but it made a difference. If you go on the track with this car and you have slow speed, medium speed and high-speed corners distributed evenly then I am screwed, because you are kind of stuck of the middle.

You have oversteer in the slow speed corners, massive understeer in the high speed corners, and you are half decent in-between. But I don't do well with oversteer at slow speed and I don't do well with understeer at high speed so I get the short end of the stick and get pretty badly kicked, it has always been my problem.

I don't adapt to these cars very well when it is unbalanced like this and I need a car that is balanced in the slow, balanced in the middle and balanced at high speed. Otherwise I don't have confidence and I don't do well.

Usually they tend to be always way to find solutions setup wise but with this car there is a narrower characteristics and whatever you do to the setup it doesn't change anything to this. We have huge migration in the aero balance of this car and, as a consequence, I have been struggling since we introduced the new aero package in Magny-Cours.

For sure it is a much quicker car, there is no doubt about that, but I just don't do well with it. Mark (Webber) and Sebastian (Vettel) are doing much better, while David (Coulthard) is sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy.

I am not expecting wonders for the next few races but now what is done is done and taken is taken, I've done what I can do and what I am explained is the reason why I am struggling in the car, not just pretending and moaning. If I felt comfortable and happy with the balance of the car I could do it. That is not the problem. It is just we cannot get it to my liking on most tracks.

Q. There has been a positive trend since Valencia though...

SB: I wouldn't say we showed improvements in Valencia, I would say that the team have made big improvements and the car potential was a lot stronger. If you look at Valencia, Sebastian kicked my arse - flat square. He put six tenths on me in Q3 and there were no improvements. It was the biggest gap between the two of us. I was particularly unhappy with the balance of the car. I could not deal with the oversteer in slow corners and whatever we did, it did not change a thing. So it was very frustrating your teammate being very happy with the balance of the car.

I keep saying, 'sorry guys, I understand he likes it but I just cannot drive this car'. It is no surprise. All winter when Sebastian was happy with the car and I wasn't, he was kicking my arse. And we started to work on the setup and we got decently happy, not all the time but more or less, and sometimes I was quicker, sometimes he was quicker but we were evenly matched. Then the STR3 arrived and there was no match. We were like 5/4 until Canada and then STR3 arrived and up until Spa it was 5-0.

So there was no game and he was particularly happy. He was not complaining about anything with the car, nothing fundamental other than a bit of understeer here or three. There is no miracle in racing - it is happy combination of driver and car or unhappy ones. When it is not the right combination we don't perform very well.

Q. Do you think Sebastian being from a new karting generation helps him?

SB: I've done go karts as well. It is where the comfort zone is. I have a comfort zone that is very narrow and he has got it three times as big, so his expectation of what for him is a good car is just much wider. He deals with problems a lot wider than I do. And that is a quality.

I am not denying my weaknesses, but it has always been my weakness. My strength has never really been to drive an unbalanced car better than anybody else. It has always been to analyse the car, tell me what is wrong with it, what doesn't fit me, fix it and then we go quick. But the problem is we cannot do anything to this car that provides a solution.

So I did the best I could but I was in a damage limited world and that doesn't really get you anywhere. It is not the world where you can do okay. You have to do well. If you just use 60 percent of your potential because the car limits you then it isn't going to work.

Q. Do you feel your performance in Spa eases the pressure on you over next year's contract?

SB: It depends what frame of mind the owners are going to have after this, but to be honest I don't really look at what they think. I am just doing my job. I don't owe more to Franz (Tost) or Gerhard (Berger) than I do to the guys who are working their tails off every day to make these cars reliable and competitive.

I have felt really shit to be honest since Magny-Cours, not because I got kicked by my teammate because stronger is stronger, but I am convinced I am not any slower than Sebastian in a car where I am comfortable. It is just if I'm not comfortable then I am going to get kicked quite clearly. So if Spa eases the pressure off I don't know.

It will ease not much but for sure I will feel more comfortable that the reason why I don't perform well in this car was understood and accepted, and then maybe fixed later on. For sure if I am judged upon my performance on this car where I am a shadow of myself then it is just frustrating.

It is not pressure or anything, it is plain frustrating. I didn't think it was going to be like what has happened. If I had known it would be the drag to drive the car weekend after weekend, where I can't drive it, then let's face it, what is the point? I am useless. If you end up where you are a driver and you can't complain, where there is nothing you can do other than drive, then I am just doing half my job. I have never really been good at doing half my job.

People say, 'oh he is bitching, he is never happy, he is doing this or doing that' then at the end of the day - who cares? Nobody cares. The truth is they only want results. I know why things are happening and if people want to know why, then here is the explanation. I only feel good when I do my job.

Q. Do you think your problem is just because of the characteristics of the STR3 as opposed to F1 cars in general?

SB: Absolutely. The STR2 was not a problem. Like I said, the aero migration which is not three times as big, but which is two and a half times as big as the STR2 makes it really difficult for me. End of story. Again, it is nothing to do with anybody trying to design a car that fits somebody better than somebody else. It is just this is the car that scored the best result in the wind tunnel, so the team produce it and, fair enough, there are some drivers that adapt to it better than I do.

Q. Next year's cars have totally different aero performance. So thinks could be very different for you then?

SB: I don't believe that there are many cars that have that much of a shift between low speed and high speed. Fair enough it is the way it is this year, fine, but given the fact that Toro Rosso will be a bit more of an independent team because they start developing resources and stuff like this to prepare for 2010, then even if the car starts in a certain way you can work towards your own solutions if it is still a problem.

If the team knows the car is that way, then it is not going to be good for me. It is always the first year where everyone tries to understand who and what and how, and that is what makes the whole difference between my first year in Newman Haas and my second year where we pretty much blew everybody off. I got in the Newman Haas car in 2003 and the car was bloody good in street courses but definitely not to my liking on road courses. My only chance was that my race engineer was the aerodynamicist at Newman Haas. He understood what I needed and he changed the car and the next year it was a completely different game.

Q. Do you believe you deserve another chance in Formula One?

SB: Is it my judgement? And in any case it doesn't matter what I think. Obviously I would like to stay, but it all depends on what the expectations are. If their expectations are for me to adapt to a car I don't like, then I don't think it's a good idea to keep me. If they believe in my potential and my perception of things, which I personally believe can lead to an even better car because it has always been the way I function, then yes we should definitely give it a try, keep on working and make it better.