Bumpy Start: interview with Rubens Barrichello

The arrival of Rubens Barrichello at Honda should have been one of the stories of the season, but thus far things haven't gone the way of the Brazilian. The world is watching to see if he can strike out on his own, away from the long shadow cast by Michael Schumacher. But there's no escaping the fact that he's struggled to match new teammate Jenson Button for pace.

Of course, it's early days. The sport is so competitive now that even an experienced driver takes time to find his feet in a new team, as was the case with Juan Pablo Montoya at McLaren last year. Cars and their complex systems work in different ways, and in Barrichello's case there's also the small matter of the move to Michelin tyres, having been with Bridgestone since the company's arrival 1997.

If a driver is not comfortable, and the new package does not suit his driving style as well as the one he's just abandoned, life won't be easy.

But the transition is made doubly hard when the incumbent driver has been there for a while, is working in perfect harmony with his environment, and has boundless confidence. Getting on to his level is not going to be the work of a moment, as Montoya - and Renault returnee Giancarlo Fisichella - discovered last year.

In such circumstances, a good start to the year goes a long way to addressing any doubts, but pretty much everything that could go wrong for Rubens Barrichello, has gone wrong.

In the Bahrain Grand Prix, he suffered a gearbox problem during the race, but rather than take the chance to park and pick up a free engine change for Malaysia, Barrichello soldiered on to the finish.

In Malaysia, that used engine began to go wrong on Saturday morning, and the team agreed to make a change before qualifying. With time pressing, they also took the opportunity to put him in the T-car, used by Anthony Davidson on Friday. That at least gave him the chance to get a feel for a different chassis, and see if there was a particular problem with his regular race car.

But the engine change also consigned him to a 10-place penalty, so he ultimately started the race in 20th, with only Felipe Massa and Ralf Schumacher behind him.

Like his countryman and replacement at Ferrari, Rubens started with a full tank on a one-stop strategy. It wasn't easy to make progress, but he did OK until his race was ruined by another technical glitch. This time the pitlane speed limiter did not engage properly as he left, and his subsequent offence brought him a drive-through penalty.

"The limiter should have been activated," he said after the race. "We're still learning what happened, but for some reason I got out and the thing wasn't working. I press it when I come in, and it should be on all the time. I tried to stop, but I couldn't."

Rubens Barrichello in Bahrain © LAT

The penalty put him out of contention for what should have turned into seventh place and earned points that would have been much appreciated. Instead he's still on zero, while Button has taken solid scores from both races. It's not the way that Rubens wanted to start the season, and he's well aware that he's got to find the sort of speed that kept Schumacher on his toes over the last few years.

"It's been down in the performance in the way that I wished. I have to drive so differently from the way I've done these last six years. There's no excuse, I just have to get it going.

"I need to get to the bottom of my problems before I say that I'm happy or not. Right now I'm just disappointed, because something has happened in these two hot races, where the grip is lower than in the test. I'm struggling on brakes and traction quite a lot.

"Jenson is just used to the car, and he's doing a superb job. I'm not too concerned about my pace to him, I'm concerned that I'm below my own expectations on the driving. It's not a mind game now, I'm just re-learning something on the car."

He's also been unlucky. While Button had a clutch problem at the start in Bahrain, it was Barrichello who lost a gear there, and then suffered both an engine problem and the limiter glitch in Malaysia.

"It doesn't help, and I would have finished in the points in both. But for someone who thought that we had a car to win the first two races, it's a little bit below the expectations, so we have to keep on working really hard."

That's an interesting admission as to where Rubens thought he and the team would be after what had been a promising winter test programme. But he's been through tough times before, and those years at Ferrari have made him mentally strong.

"To be honest with you, it's disappointing having scored zero points in both races. But at the end of the day I know where I stand, I know how I can to go to bed and really rely on my talent. I will overcome the problems. It's not a thing of being arrogant or anything, I just have to keep my head down and work as hard as I can, and things will be done."

On the plus side, Rubens has a lot of support from within the team. Team chief Nick Fry and sporting director Gil de Ferran put their balls on the line when they headhunted Rubens - after all it meant turfing out Takuma Sato and dealing with the ensuing political fallout - and they're not about to let the Brazilian down.

As we've seen with the way they've supported Button, Honda is a bit more 'touchy feely' than some of their rivals, where a driver who's struggling won't get much leeway. Indeed the team admit that they hasn't given Barrichello a fair chance yet, and that they have to provide a more reliable car.

"It was a promising drive from him," says team principal Nick Fry of Barrichello in Malaysia. "He was on course for seventh place, and points would have been nice. From the back of the grid, that was a decent performance. The secret to this is, don't start from the back of the grid! So we need to give him a reliable engine, and he needs to continue to get more comfortable with the team and the car.

"He does need a break. We shouldn't think that these things are easy to drive. They're very different from each other, our traction control system, our braking system, a lot of the way our car works is very different from the one he's been driving for a long time.

Rubens Barrichello © XPB/LAT

"Jenson has grown up with it, he's helped develop it, and he's a master at it. Rubens needs to develop his style to suit the car, and we need to develop the car to suit his style. There needs to be a bit of movement on both sides.

"The car is different from the Ferrari, and he's learning about the team. I think everyone expected that it would take a little bit of time to get up to speed. We haven't got any particular concerns."

There's one area where Barrichello has definitely impressed his employers. On Saturday morning in Malaysia he felt sure that there was something wrong with his engine. Naturally the Honda guys were not so sure - and after all, a change within the first two races was going to be a little embarrassing. But when they took a closer look, he was vindicated. He beat the telemetry, in other words.

"The engine definitely had a problem," says Fry. "The remarkable thing about Rubens is that he feels these small things before the data shows it. He was suspicious right from the start of that session that the engine wasn't quite as good as it should have been, and then it let go."

Rubens is proud of his ability to spot things like that: "On that side I don't have a problem, I've always had a good feeling for things like that. That's why I keep bits of engine at home.

"I've got a bit of a Ferrari, I have a bit of a go-kart engine, I have some Peugeot parts, because there was a bet going on. I stopped before it broke, and said if it's true, just give me the parts. So I have some trophies because of that!"

Let's hope he picks up the right kind of trophies sooner rather than later.