Ross Brawn Q&A
In the immediate aftermath of the European Grand Prix, Ross Brawn launched an assault on Juan Pablo Montoya, questioning his class and calling his spectacular overtaking move crude. It was also a reflection of the fact that it had been a tough day at the office, and Ferrari had been clearly beaten on pace. Later Michael Schumacher did his best to play down Montoya's part in the incident, but perhaps he was not quite so generous when speaking to the team on the radio, and that had influenced Brawn's thinking. Adam Cooper heard the Ferrari technical director's thoughts
"There's a good way of doing things and there's a bad way of doing things. Juan-Pablo doesn't show much class on occasions. He just gets alongside a driver and turns in, regardless of what the consequences are. We had many years of Mika and Michael fighting each other, and in my recollection they never knocked each other off. Juan-Pablo is involved in far too many incidents, like Coulthard here last year. He's just a crude driver when it comes to overtaking, and I think it's unacceptable."
"Maybe he would have got past for second place. They were looking very strong, so perhaps he would have had a better opportunity later. But yes, he's cost Michael a number of points."
"No, in fact it's improved. Michael scored four points today, so it's helped. But it could be so much better. Overtaking is the exciting part of the race. We like to see overtaking. But it's got to be done with a little bit of class, and that was just crude."
"I was hoping we'd be more competitive, and we weren't. Clearly once the race started, we were not competitive enough."
"It's the whole package. It's difficult to separate one or the other. Everyone's got to work harder, because we weren't competitive enough today."
"I think it was probably a reflection on how competitive we were. Ralf had more fuel and could do the same lap time in qualifying. Kimi had the same fuel and he could go quicker in qualifying. So I think it's just a reflection of our performance this weekend."
"Yeah, but I guess Williams are going to start giving us a hard time. We just need to improve the whole package, work harder and improve our performance."
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