"We have been testing already at Sepang last week, which will help us with set-up information and, hopefully, we will have more performance from the car as well," he said, "I have very good memories of Malaysia because I achieved Toyota’s first
F1 podium there in 2005, and that is probably the best race of my time with the team so far. It would be great if we could repeat that kind of result, but we know we still have some work to do to catch up with the top teams because, in Australia, we were still a bit away."
Senior general manager Pascal Vasselon echoes a number of his peers in claiming that Malaysia will give a truer reflection of the current pecking order.
“We will get a better idea in Malaysia of how competitive each team is, because Melbourne is historically quite an unusual race in terms of performance," he explained, "That is especially true when it comes to tyres.
In Malaysia, we do not expect to have the kind of warming up problems you usually see in Australia, so this is the first race which will show how the car behaves when the tyres are working well. We did reasonably well in Australia, but we want to achieve more and we’ll be looking for more performance in Malaysia, where we expect to score more points.”
Red Bull Racing – David Coulthard (#14), Mark Webber (#15):
After the hype of pre-season, Red Bull Racing suffered a disappointing first race with the Adrian Newey-designed RB3, even though Mark Webber propelled the machine into the final stage of qualifying.
Having lined up seventh and tried to hang on to
Giancarlo Fisichella in the early stages, the Aussie was slowed by a faulty fuel filler cap, which refused to work properly and affected the performance of the car. Team-mate David Coulthard dropped out in the first stage of qualifying, but made early progress in the race until making a mess of passing Alex Wurz on lap 48, putting both cars out of the race.
