Q:
Lewis, your tyres were clearly off at the end of the race, but even earlier than that when Monfardini was in front, when you should have been expected to cut a lot of time out of him, he was actually pulling away a little: did you have any other problems today?
Lewis:
No, the car was good for the whole race. Obviously we tried to … after my pitstop I pushed very hard for the first ten laps to try and jump as many people as possible when they did their pitstop, and then afterwards when I came out in the lead I was trying to protect my tyres, because here it's very hard on the tyres, especially the last two corners. So just trying to look after them and try and stay consistent in my times, and obviously there were a lot of yellow flags so I lifted plenty, because otherwise they probably would have given me another penalty! In the last ten laps it was a real struggle and I could see that Alex was catching me, and I tried to keep the gap as much as possible, but then in the last five laps the tyres were gone and I was just trying to bring it home.
Q:
Nelson, your car actually looked quite good all day. Obviously you were on a race winning pace other than the drive through. Was the car as good as it looked at the end of the race because you seemed to have no problem passing people.
Nelson:
Yeah it was good. Of course after the pitstop, because I didn’t change all four tyres, the balance of the car changed all through the race, and also I had some gearbox problems so I had to slow down in the end of the race and I lost a bit of pace. But for sure if you see just the difference between me and Alex it was only 11 seconds and when you do a drive through you lose about 20 seconds, so I think without it I could have won the race with about… ten seconds at least, and without the traffic I got maybe a bit more. The car was good, really good. I think we can still improve it of course, but it’s difficult in GP2 because it’s a long race with only one stop. We tried to change as few tyres as possible to try to do a quick stop, and the car needs to be really good, especially at a track like this for the tyres to last. I think its one of the most difficult circuits to set the car up, to make the tyres last. Otherwise the car was great. Tomorrow’s going to be an interesting race and we’re going to make the car a bit better.
Q:
Did you have the right pit strategy today?
Nelson:
It’s difficult to say because I don’t know how much understeer or oversteer I would have got if I’d changed more tyres… it depends how many tyres we changed. But I don’t really regret doing the strategy I did, but it’s difficult to say how the car would react if I’d change a different number of tyres, throughout the end of the race. Would the tyres grain? What would have happened? Maybe the safest thing is to change all four tyres? But then it takes a long time, and Lewis was catching me because he had stopped and he had fresher tyres so… overall the car was good.
![Alexandre Premat - ART Grand Prix [pic credit: GP2 media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/209402.jpg)
