Thursday, 10th April 2008

Toyota #2 looks back on round three in the 2008 FIA F1 World Championship.

Q:
So do you find yourself thinking about car development much more?

TG:
It's strange because it is in your head 24 hours a day and all you can do is try to improve. It is not easy to progress even though so much development is going on. If you do make one tiny mistake and go in the wrong direction, you lose time. Formula 1 is more complex, the team is much bigger than GP2 and the car is more involved in terms of aerodynamics; it makes a huge difference when, for example, the wind changes. Then there are the grooved tyres which require a different approach to slicks, so there has been a lot of work to do but I am constantly developing and I'm pretty happy with how things are going so far.

Q:
Are you looking forward to testing at Barcelona before the European season starts?

TG:
Yes. It will be an important week because the pre-season Barcelona test was quite difficult for me as I struggled a bit with getting the tyres working in the conditions. But the temperatures were quite low and that won't be the case when we go back. Jarno had a better feeling with the car and he set a fast lap time on the last day of pre-season testing. We have a lot of work to do at the test; we are working with some new aero parts - the first new aero package of the season - and the whole team is determined to keep pushing to close the gap on the top three teams.

Q:
How is the feeling within the team?

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TG:
Everyone was really happy about the points in Malaysia and Jarno carried that through to Bahrain with another good result while I had a strong race, despite the gearbox problem towards the end. You could already see in Melbourne how good it was for motivation when we got both cars through to Q3 and then in Malaysia and Bahrain we have shown that our car is really competitive, so you can see that everyone is pushing as hard as possible. The pack behind McLaren, Ferrari and BMW is very tight but we seem to be best of the rest of the moment. The top three teams are not so far in front and it is so tight between Red Bull, Williams and us. The whole team is working really hard and feeling optimistic.

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