Todt Surprised by F2002 Competitiveness in Brazil

Ferrari's sporting director Jean Todt has claimed Michael Schumacher's win in the third round of this year's Championship in Brazil was a very difficult victory.

Schumacher won his fourth Brazilian Grand Prix in the racing debut of the F2002 chassis, beating his brother Ralf in the Williams-BMW by only half a second, and Todt said he did not expect his team to be so competitive.

"I think it was very difficult to win, particularly given what we'd seen of our rivals' performance," said the Frenchman. "Their package seemed more consistent than ours. And it didn't work out like that. In the end it worked in our favour.

"I thought we were going to be competitive but I thought the others would be very competitive. I thought that they were favourites. But having said that, I knew we had an opportunity and that has been shown yesterday."

Todt also admitted that a pre-Brazil test in Barcelona left him optimistic about the revolutionary car's potential, and said the decision to take it to Interlagos was made on the grounds of the performance at the Circuit de Catalunya.

"I knew that we needed to reach a certain level of reliability before deciding to use the new car," Todt said. "I was quite relieved when I saw what we were able to do in testing at Barcelona.

"If we hadn't been able to do what we did in that test, then we would not have decided to bring the new car, and we definitely knew that the new car had the better potential."

Todt revealed that Ferrari took extra staff to Brazil to cope with the pressure of working with two different cars with Rubens Barrichello competing in last year's F2001. And the Frenchman lauded the back room staff for the role they played in helping Schumacher to his second victory of the season.

"We just had to bring some extra people to do the extra jobs but it went quite smoothly, the guys were able to finish work quite early in the evenings so it was not so difficult," he said.