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Question: Nick, good to see you but in sad circumstances. I believe you have something on your helmet to acknowledge Robert?
Nick Heidfeld: Yes, I have his initials, RK, on the front of my helmet.
Question: It was obviously a late change for you to take over his seat. You were obviously working with Pirelli before then as a test driver; how much of an advantage was that?
Nick Heidfeld: Well, I think one thing that could have been an advantage was that I helped in the early part of development on the construction, so at least that should have been something that suited me well. I wasn’t there when they developed the compounds and what I found out in testing was that I had no advantage at all in knowing how to set up the car, because you can imagine that when you develop a tyre you don’t try adjusting the set-up, you just put on new tyres, new tyres, new tyres all the time and we didn’t actually touch the set-up.
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Question: So how did things go today?
Nick Heidfeld: It was OK. It could have been better, could have been worse. We had some small issues on the car, didn’t do all the mileage we wanted but most importantly we learned quite a bit. You spoke about the tyres before with Sebastian; I also thought it was quite interesting. From testing in the winter we thought the soft tyres would only last one lap. I did my quickest lap here today on the second lap; the third lap wasn’t too bad either so this hopefully makes qualifying a bit less of a problem, because we will see more pit stops. And then on top of that, we see that the lap time difference between hard and soft tyres is quite big, huge - at least, compared to last year. That means that maybe only the very quick cars like the Red Bull may be able to use the hard tyres and save some soft tyres, but most other cars will already have to use soft tyres in Q1 to get through. That means that you only have two sets left for later on which you might also have to use in the race, so it makes things very different, quite interesting and complicated.
Question: And obviously if you get through to Q3, you’re probably going to be on soft tyres, you’ve got to start the race on soft tyres.
Nick Heidfeld: Yes, definitely. It’s the same as last year. Of course they will last a bit longer but I don’t think that is the big issue; the big question is how many stops is it after that? On simulations, in winter testing in Barcelona, we’ve seen most cars and people doing three stops but you also saw that their lap times became quite slow towards the end of the stint. That was just to find out where the limit is. So it might be that in a real race situation you would have seen four stops. That, again, will be interesting to see. Today’s degradation was obviously a lot better but it should spice up the racing. It will be interesting to see how difficult it is to overtake during the race. It’s going to be new for everybody.
Question: And also there’s the possibility of better weather on Saturday, increased track temperatures as well. How much of a difference will that make?
Nick Heidfeld: Nobody knows, because it wasn’t that hot in winter testing. Some people believe that with higher temperatures we will see the circuit improving and the rubber sticking to the surface for once. Now we just see marbles off-line, which might also make overtaking more difficult, but as Sebastian said, throughout winter testing the circuit was pretty much the same from day one to the end.
Question: Nick how difficult was it to find your way back to Formula One in such a short time, and do you feel happy to be there, just as you were in other teams?
Nick Heidfeld: Well, of course I’m extremely excited – as we’ve discussed – I’ve said many times that this is not the circumstances I wished for, with Robert’s really, really bad accident, but the team has made it very easy for me. They were very open right from the beginning and I only missed one test so I missed two days of driving. What I missed more was being with the team but the time that I’ve had up to now was enough to make up for that. I was probably a bit busier than the others in those early weeks but now I think I’ve caught up.
Question: Nick, we were normally used to seeing Robert in front of Vitaly in FP1, 2, 3, qualifying etc last year. Do you think it’s going to happen to you too? Do you have the same level as Robert? How do you see it?
Nick Heidfeld: Well, I guess you asked the question because you saw that in P1 I was not in front of Vitaly but of course I will try to do my best, to do the best performance I can. I’m quite confident that I will be able to do that and will show some good performance.
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