Todt Baffled by Ferrari's Pace in France

Having headed into the Magny-Cours race full of confidence after another encouraging qualifying performance, which had previously been the team's Achilles Heel, the reigning World Champions were left frustrated at being unable to match the speed of Renault or McLaren.

Todt said that the team had no answers to explain where their problems lay on Sunday, but expressed some frustration that their gains in qualifying form appeared to have been at the expense of their race pace.

"It's too early at the moment," he said. "We have to look at it carefully with all our other technical partners and make an in depth analysis so that we work out what happened exactly in order to understand it for future races."

Todt admitted that the competitive lap times shown by Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello on Friday and Saturday had left the team confident they were in the hunt for a win.

"We thought the same thing as well so we made a mistake," said Todt. "Basically, in the race, we never succeeded in matching the rhythm of our main rivals and Michael, nevertheless, still managed to hold onto third place which, in terms of the Championship, isn't bad, even though we think it insufficient.

"We thought we had better pace. I think the others had less difference between qualifying and the race than we had. Everybody was much slower yesterday than Saturday because of the temperature, but we were over a second slower than the others.

"You see Michael's time, 1.2s and Rubens was 1.5s I think, so that's what was missing today. It was the same for everybody. Just simply because in these conditions we were not as quick as the others.

"We made some improvement in qualifying and today I would say that what we got in qualifying we lost in the race, compared to the previous races. So we were more ahead but we did not get the advantage of using it. If we could have done we would have been quicker during the race."

Speaking about the World Championship hopes of the team, Todt said: "Things aren't over yet. I think we can still see a good battle for the drivers' and constructors' title because there are still three teams with three drivers who can still win the Championship."