Q & A with Super Aguri's Daniel Audetto

Takuma Sato drove well all afternoon, and overcame some late race pressure from Renault's Giancarlo Fisichella, to bring his SA07 home in eighth place.

Autosport.com caught up with the team's managing director Daniel Audetto to find out just what this point meant, and whether or not the team now feel they have achieved their season's target.

Q. What does this first point feel like?

Daniel Audetto: For me it is like a Ferrari victory, because we are a small team. Everybody maybe forgets that we just started a little bit more than a year ago, but the motivation, the patience, the competence of these people is amazing.

I have never worked with a team so motivated and, at the end of the day, it paid off. That is because the creativity and the professionalism of their work always pays off. We have two good drivers; the strategy today was perfect; the choice of the tyres was fantastic and the pace of Taku was really good. So we cannot do better.

Of course we had a little bit of luck. But, like always, you need to have that and we didn't have it in the first three races. With (Giancarlo) Fisichella needing to refuel one more time, that just put us in the points and I think the team really deserved it.

Q. When did you realise that you were in the hunt for points?

DA: We saw the pace of the car in the different sectors in qualifying. So if you looked at the ideal time, you saw that we were in the top ten. But Anthony's mistake and the fuel pick up problem of Taku did not allow us to show our real potential

So we kept a good strategy for the race. The pace was consistent and the tyres kept very well. Taku did a fantastic job and was very consistent. Even before we were in the points he was fighting very close with Giancarlo Fisichella, and was all the time competitive. So this was not a point from luck. It was a point that we really deserved.

Q. How nervous were you in the last few laps?

DA: You know, we are professionals. So until the last lap you have to stay focused and concentrate. And then the explosion from the team was like how a victory must feel for Ferrari.

Q. What do you think of the job Takuma Sato has done for Super Aguri?

DA: Now he understands he has a team behind him, and really feels the support, he is very confident. I think the confidence and the psychology of a driver is very important. He always showed with BAR that he had the speed, and we sometimes forget that he also had a podium finish in Indianapolis (in 2004). But also, for him, this point was more important than his podium in the US.

Q. Is this your target for the season achieved now?

DA: No. We always want to improve, but you have to understand that as a small team with a small budget we don't have the pace of development like other teams. So we try to compensate with our creativity and the speed to transform the ideas without too much bureaucracy. We are only focused on one thing - performance, performance, performance.

For Aguri Suzuki and I, when we started this adventure, it was really a big challenge and very few people believed we could make it successful.

Even at the start of the season last year it was already a big success. To then be 10th in Brazil with the seventh quickest time was also a big success with an old car. And now we show the world that it was not just by luck that we did a good race in Brazil. It was really a good job.