Symonds 'massively relieved' after win

After heading into the race convinced that Ferrari were going to upstage the world champions for the third race on the trot, and openly admitting that he was 'scared' by their pace on old tyres, Symonds saw the formbook turn on its head as Alonso dominated from the start.

"It just proves that I know nothing at all," joked Symonds afterwards about the pessimism before the race. "I was surprised how competitive we were.

"The first lap performance of our tyres was good and I expected that, but we only had one set left for the race and that worried me. What turned it around a lot was the sheer grip and the low degradation that we had in the race.

"On Saturday, in the morning, when it had been a bit cooler, the Bridgestone had looked better, but what we had this afternoon, there is no doubt we had the better tyre and we had the faster car. And it was largely due to that.

"I really was quite pessimistic on Saturday night and early on race morning and I sort of set some targets of what we needed to get to. And, by lap five I thought, 'crikey, we are way ahead of these' and it really was coming to us.

"And, as you look at the tyre degradation as we got through the race - and we got better degradation than the Bridgestone - I started thinking it was doable."

On the back of Schumacher's back-to-back victories at the San Marino and European Grands Prix, Symonds admitted that there was an element of relief at the fact that Ferrari's run of success had been stopped.

"I'm massively relieved," he said. "There were some worries after the recent races, and the choice of tyres for this race was made before Imola, at the end of the Silverstone test, so I was worried."

Symonds thinks that the performance swing between Ferrari and Renault in the last few races is likely to be the pattern for the season.

"Ferrari had seemed to turn the corner a little bit on us, but it is going to go up and down all season I think," he said.

"There is certainly not domination by one tyre company as there was last year. They are close and because it is such a difficult thing to get exactly right, I think you will make these predictions like we are going to Monaco and this will be the temperature, but look at what happened at Imola.

"What a difference there to what we expected, so you can easily choose the wrong tyres for the conditions and someone else might be a little bit closer to the mark."