Question: Heikki, your impressions do you have of the team’s performance?
Heikki Kovalainen: I think the performance has been better than I was expecting. The first time that I went to visit Mike and so on, just before Christmas, I think there were four people working and Mike was telling me it is all going to be fine and we are going to be finishing races. I did have my doubts. But little by little the team has actually very positively surprised me and I have no doubts now anymore that we wouldn’t be successful. I think we have hit all the targets and we have been ahead of the schedules and the team is incredibly professional. The work with the team goes exactly the same it went with McLaren or with Renault or with any top team. The boys, engineers, mechanics and the team management have all been involved before, so the operation runs as professionally as any other team. We just need a bit of time to put some performance into the car and at the moment I am very happy where I am and I think things are going incredibly well.
Question: What has the build-up to this race been like? Been busy?
Heikki Kovalainen: Yeah, very busy. Even with last year’s team I did have a lot of marketing but this week has been a record. It has been a fun week with, like Tony said, a very positive welcome for us. Everywhere we have been, not only with our team partners, but commercial people being involved, but a lot of fans have turned up to our events which is very positive and it is a range of different people who are interested in the whole group of Lotus, what we are doing, the whole style of Lotus. It has been very good, a very enjoyable week for me here and meting a lot of local people. I must also say from Finland I have received a lot of positive feedback from the Finnish media, from the Finnish fans, my Finnish friends. We have touched people everywhere which is fantastic.
Question: A little summary of how things went today?
Heikki Kovalainen: I think very well. I missed the first session to give Fairuz a go, but I was comfortable I could pick up the pace immediately on the second session. I have been around here many times and also in Melbourne I was very comfortable with the car and I felt 110 per cent comfortable to miss just one session and get back on the pace and it confirmed my feeling. The car was almost there. The performance is still not what we want it to be but in terms of balance it was not that far off. We tweaked a little bit and we probably work a bit overnight, but I felt that I was straight on the pace and I am feeling comfortable, so I am very happy after today and everything worked out as we were planning.
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