Renault is sharp, admits Brawn

Fernando Alonso scored pole position on Saturday, shading world championship leader Michael Schumacher by just over a quarter of a second. Brawn is regarded as a master of strategy, but admits that Renault has also been good in that regard this season.

"There is lots of potential for the strategy in the race tomorrow," said Brawn. "It's a multi-stop race, therefore there is a lot of potential strategy for getting your pitstops right. But Renault are pretty sharp on strategy and make very good pitstops, so I think it might be close.

"Michael didn't seem to have a very good last sector for some reason on his qualifying lap; I need to talk to him about it. It was very good up until the end of sector two, but then I'm not sure what happened."

Brawn believes Schumacher is well placed to maintain his stunning hit rate of victories on Sunday, but admits he has his work cut out to get team-mate Rubens Barrichello into the reckoning after he qualified down in 10th, the legacy of a hydraulic problem that forced him out of pre-qualifying.

"We are reasonably happy, it certainly gives us a challenge tomorrow and we need to work on our strategy this evening," he said. "The tyres are very good for the race. We're disappointed with what happened to Rubens, not giving him a run in first qualifying made it very difficult. We decided the best thing to do was forgo qualifying and fix it to make sure we had a good car for second qualifying and the race.

One aspect Brawn says he is not worried about is the Renault's reputation for making excellent starts: "I said before the session that there was no point in being on pole if Alonso was alongside us, because he'd beat us at the start anyway. Now he's in front of us, we don't have to worry about that now!"