"There was a little trouble in the first and second stints with a bit of graining with the softer tyre, compromising our pace a little bit, so the only time for me really to attack was at the end of the stint when I was able to push more.
It was always going to be the laps at the end of the stint when we felt we would be stronger compared to the others. That's why the team decided to keep me on the track a bit longer. I wasn't too worried when Jarno [Trulli] was in front of me, because I knew I was going very long in the second stint and I was fairly sure he wouldn't be going that long.
I just kept it nice and easy with my tyres, trying to make sure they were in good shape whenever he pitted and I was able to do a few good laps at that point. It was absolutely the right thing to do and I was able to jump him.
After that the car worked pretty well and in the last stint I had a gap to the front and to the back, so we turned the engines down and just brought it home. For me [it was] a pretty good day; we would have liked to have been a couple of positions higher, but that was the maximum we could do.
As to the weekend's biggest news the pace evinced by arch-rivals Ferrari following the
Scuderia/I>'s Melbourne debacle Kovalainen was phlegmatic, and whilst he insisted that McLaren's true pace had been badly harmed by their qualifying penalty, he admitted that the two scarlet machines had been, quite simply, out of reach.
I think there was no way we could match Ferrari, he reflected. BMW also seemed to be very strong on race day, but then again when you start further down on the grid, it's always going to be a compromise. You initially lose quite a lot of time; [over] the first few laps you can lose a couple of seconds a lap if you get stuck in traffic and you're fighting for position, so by the time I got going in the race, the gap to Robert [Kubica] was 17 seconds.
It's impossible to say what would have happened had we started where we qualified, but in any case I think we did the maximum that was possible.
