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Ron Dennis Q&A

With the Williams boys taking each other out of podium contention at Indianapolis David Coulthard had a good run to third. Thanks to McLaren's favoured strategy of stopping late he actually got pretty close to the Ferraris when they made their first stop - it's been a while since we've seen anyone near the red cars at half distance, never mind the circumstances. Retirement for Kimi Raikkonen was a downside on what was otherwise a good day for the team. Adam Cooper spoke to Ron Dennis after the race



"It was a bit painful. We know now we had a spark plug failure on Kimi's car, and ultimately the engine failed. When the spark doesn't fire then you've got the fuel washing lubrication off the cylinder all the time. To run nine cylinders, and he was faster than most of the field with nine cylinders, was a tremendous effort."



"He had to nurse the car for the last 40 laps. He had a bit of a problem, but it was a shame that we couldn't really push hard and see what we could achieve. But we've taken a step and hopefully we can carry it into Japan."



"I think it's the right strategy. Of course they won the race so it's easy to say they had the right strategy, but it's a question of they are quicker. For the strategy to be proved right you've got to be running three cars with equal speed and have one strategy work over the other, but I don't think we had the pace. If we almost had the pace, and if we had just a couple of seconds more we would have been able to emerge ahead of them and then it would have been a different matter. We could have held them up to a point where they couldn't have taken sufficient lead in the second section of the race, and we could have won. But we're moving closer."



"We'll wait and see. You can have very difficult weather. It can be super cold, or super wet, or super hot at this time of year. If it's warm, I think we should be in good shape."



"I don't want to be drawn into the debate. It's not how we go motor racing. If other teams chose to have a different approach... I don't think some of the comments are particularly constructive, and I don't think you should ever trivialise what is a very challenging sport. To win in Grand Prix racing or win in F1 is very hard. If you're in the wonderful position of being able to explore a performance advantage, I don't think that should give you the platform to trivialise any race or World Championship."

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