Q: (Daniel Garcia –
The Press Association)
A question to Pat: Can the Spanish fans be optimistic after today's results or do they have to wait until tomorrow?
PS:
I don't think the results of Friday are ever a good indication of how everything is going to go throughout the weekend. As I said earlier, I am hopeful and reasonably confident that we've moved forward a little bit. To say that we've moved up to the front row of the grid would be incorrect, we most definitely haven't, so I think you just need to decide what level of optimism you're aiming at.
Q:
Perhaps we thought that the return of Fernando would also be a return to the days when Fernando was in the team, but it doesn't seem to have happened. We all know there was a problem last year with using the new tyres. Have you found the problem that is holding you up this year?
PS:
Yes, I think it's well known that really our major problem last year was that we lacked correlation between the wind tunnel and the car, and it was something that as we looked into it, we traced back in fact to the end of 2006, it wasn't just the 2007 problem. Where we are now, I think, is suffering from the wake of that problem. It took a long while to identify it precisely and to understand how it had occurred and then to fix it and all that was time that we would rather have been developing the car and moving it forward. So I would say that the car had a problem this year in the sense that it had a problem last year. What it suffers from is a little bit of a lack of development. When you're running your wind tunnels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as pretty well everyone is now, and in our case it's a single wind tunnel, it's hard to find extra time. We stopped development of last year's car early, we released this year's car a little bit later than we have done in previous years, and all of that was to try and make up time. It wasn't enough, and I think that where we lack now is simple aerodynamic efficiency, the sort of week on week improvements that you make. We just need a few more weeks to make them and it's very hard because it means that all the time you have to be improving at a greater rate than your rivals and these are pretty tough rivals sitting round me.
Q: (Dan Knutson –
National Speed Sport News)
Adrian, given that winglets are banned next year, would the temptation be to make the monocoque into winglets or would the rules prevent that?
AN:
I think the answer is that the rules prevent it. The rules have an even more extensive set of exclusion areas where you can't put bodywork than we have currently, and on top of that there's a regulation where there's a minimum cross-sectional curvature from near the front of the side pod, all the way to the rear axle which is designed to try and prevent flick-ups and winglets and so forth. In that sense, they are pretty thorough, they are quite complicated, they'll certainly create a much simpler looking shape, I think, in all cases. From a purely technical point of view, it's quite fun at the moment to have a new set of rules to get your teeth into and think about, but ultimately they will be a more restrictive set of regulations. It depends on your viewpoint as to whether you think that's a good thing or not.
