Question: What are your feelings about the circuit? Have you had a look?
Heikki Kovalainen: I think it looks great. I ran it on Tuesday night, as soon as I arrived here, and I think it should be an exciting race. It looks like there is room to overtake but as we saw in Valencia it is still not very easy, so it is difficult to comment whether we will see a good race here or not but it should be a spectacular evening and at least it is something different to what we are normally used to.
Question: Any concerns about the night race?
Heikki Kovalainen: First of all for myself I have really stayed in the European time and all the things have been scheduled according to a normal grand prix weekend. I haven’t been keeping an eye on the time over here. I have just been looking at my own watch and going to sleep at the normal time and I wake up at the normal time. All the appearances are at the normal time, so nothing really had changed. About the weather, I didn’t see as I was sleeping but the one morning, yesterday morning, it was raining very heavily. Of course it is a bit of an unknown. It can rain here, but we have seen many times this year there have been unstable conditions in many of the races. We will just have to try and adapt to them as much as possible, so for us as team it is no particular concern. We just need to be flexible when it rains.
Question: To what extent are you now supporting Lewis in his championship effort or are you still able to race your own race?
Heikki Kovalainen: I think if I have a chance at some point somehow to help the team of course I will do so. The team has not given me any instructions to do something particular, so I will see how the situation is. Obviously the objective for myself is to try and score more points and do the maximum result every time I go out. That’s how I am approaching the weekend. If I have the chance to win the race I will try to do that. I think the best thing I can do for the team is to try and take as many points away from the other people as possible. The good thing is I can decide myself how the situation looks and there are no instructions from the team. We are both trying to do the race with maximum effort whether it is earlier or the end of the season, like we always do.
Question: What is the most exciting or challenging part of the race that you are really looking forward to?
Heikki Kovalainen: See how things go in the night, I think that’s the one thing to look forward to. Of course the race is probably the best part but to see how it works in the night will be interesting.
Question: What could be dangerous, what could go wrong in a night race?
Heikki Kovalainen: I think someone already said a little while ago that it’s not quite like a football game: if the lights go off you just stop and see how it’s going, so that obviously could be very dangerous, but I think it’s been very well taken care of. Hopefully.
Question: There is always an extra motivation when competing in your home race or Monaco. Is there any extra motivation to be the first winner here?
Heikki Kovalainen: We don’t have a Grand Prix in Finland, so every Grand Prix for me is as good as it gets, to be honest, so I look forward to winning here, I look forward to winning anywhere else. It doesn’t make a big difference to me.
Question: Given this is the first night race and the first race in Singapore, how important does it make practice tomorrow?
Heikki Kovalainen: I think the track time is going to be important and the circuit is going to be improving throughout the weekend, so to try and build it up towards qualifying will be crucial. As Mark said, there is always a balance between the information that we gain and the tyres that you have available etc. but I think, compared to a more normal circuit, it is important to do a few laps as well.
| 
|