Rubens Barrichello Q&A
Rubens Barrichello did not have a great weekend in Montreal, thanks to crashes in qualifying and the race. However, in the latter case he was an innocent victim, as he had to spin to avoid the crashing Juan Pablo Montoya. He was behind the Colombian thanks to an earlier spin while challenging eventual winner Ralf Schumacher for second, after he'd a great start to the race. And although there were some suggestions that his early pace was the result of a two-stop strategy, Rubens says this wasn't the case. From the outside it looked as though he'd made a silly mistake when he spun behind Schumacher, but in fact problems with the car contributed to the incident. With the exception of the slow starts in Austria, Ferrari's new electronic systems have looked pretty good this year, and the gremlins that struck the Brazilian were the first sign of any weakness. Adam Cooper spoke to Rubens about his bad day at the office
"The car was running quite well. The problem was that on the third lap it started to misfire, big time. I radioed and said 'I have this problem, I have this problem,' and they couldn't see anything on the telemetry. I found by myself that without traction control, the car ran cleanly. I switched it off after three laps. The problem was that we lost a sensor on the car, so it was reading different things on the car. So when I switched it off, the car was very tricky to drive. I didn't have 100% of the throttle pedal, and only 30% of the pedal was giving me full throttle already. The way I had to drive the car without the traction control, the pedal was happening too fast. It was very difficult and tricky."
"We never did. It just came so suddenly. The third lap of the race you never expect to have something like that. But before my car was running very well."
"On that lap I was coming out of the hairpin very close to Ralf, and I went for the pedal and the power came in so suddenly. You could see the wheels were spinning, and I had no traction at all. Then I was changing the balance of the car a little bit from the inside, and then when I was behind Montoya he just basically went off, and I had no choice, I had to avoid him. Without traction control my car spun to the inside."
"He just asked if I saw anything, because he thought there was something wrong on the track. He had too many problems already to apologise! He just went off and I was too close to avoid him."
"No. I was good the whole weekend with fuel and brakes. Michael has more problems with brakes than me, but I don't know if he did in the race."
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