When he won we pretty much lost it; we were absolutely ecstatic and everyone just went haywire! The victory was fantastic for the team, especially after the accident, the mess-up in qualifying and what had happened in the pit-lane in the first race. Javi is fantastic at ploughing his way through the field though – the further back you put him, the further he will go forward. He has no problem with that; he always wants to get up to the front of the field and he is normally able to do that.
The biggest problem I find we have is probably qualifying better. We don’t tend to qualify that well, so Javi usually has to do a massive job on the Saturday to be able to move forward. It could also be down to a lack of experience – he’s young and in only his second year, so put all those factors together with a lack of data and it means he doesn’t qualify tremendously well. I don’t see it as that much of a problem because we do get results at least on Sundays, but I think we should start getting wins on Saturday as well.
The atmosphere afterwards was kind of strange because we celebrated on the podium, and then got back to the awning and suddenly saw Ernesto’s chassis. That brought us back down to earth again, and we had to start working on the car straightaway. It was a bit of a pity because it cut short the celebrations for the win, but I guess that’s just racing and we have to deal with it.
In a way I’m actually glad we’re not going back to Magny-Cours. I have nothing against the people there, it’s just that the track is awful to work at and we saw Marco’s accident some time ago and you would have thought they would have learnt something before Ernesto’s. It was a very up-and-down weekend overall, and on the Monday afterwards we were all physically and mentally exhausted.
