Q: Can you tell us how important you feel that the 2009 car is going to be? How advanced you are already and what are the significant points about it?
Pat Symonds: I am not quite sure what you mean by important. Every car is important every year. It is very interesting as it’s the first big change we have had for a long while. I am sure everyone knows it is a big change to the aerodynamics and it’s a replacement of grooved tyres with slick tyres which in turn means using different weight distributions and all sorts of things. It is a very interesting challenge. It’s, I guess, quite a difficult one. We do need to start on it early and we have started on it early. I am sure we are all the same. Obviously we have had models in the wind tunnel even though we are still discussing the finer details of the aerodynamic rules. It is a good project. I hope and believe that it will improve overtaking which is one of the main reasons for kicking it all off, so let’s see what we get.
Q: Do you feel that you have made a step forward and that you have got closer to the opposition?
PS: It’s difficult to say. The test was, of course, perhaps a little bit more difficult than usual and it is always difficult to see where you are in a test. It was a bit more difficult than usual because people were running different levels of downforce and of course the 2009 tyres at times, so it wasn’t always easy to see how people were approaching things. Again, if you look at today, the mere fact we have been testing here means that the Friday programme is a little bit different to usual. I think we have made a little bit of a gain relative to most of our competitors – not all of them but most of them – but the proof of the pudding will be know by Sunday night I guess.
Q: Can the Spanish fans be optimistic after today’s results or do they have to wait until tomorrow?
PS: I don’t think the results of Friday are ever a good indication of how everything is going to go throughout the weekend. As I said earlier, I am hopeful and reasonably confident that we’ve moved forward a little bit. To say that we’ve moved up to the front row of the grid would be incorrect, we most definitely haven’t, so I think you just need to decide what level of optimism you’re aiming at.
Q: Perhaps we thought that the return of Fernando would also be a return to the days when Fernando was in the team, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. We all know there was a problem last year with using the new tyres. Have you found the problem that is holding you up this year?
PS: Yes, I think it’s well known that really our major problem last year was that we lacked correlation between the wind tunnel and the car, and it was something that as we looked into it, we traced back in fact to the end of 2006, it wasn’t just the 2007 problem. Where we are now, I think, is suffering from the wake of that problem. It took a long while to identify it precisely and to understand how it had occurred and then to fix it and all that was time that we would rather have been developing the car and moving it forward. So I would say that the car had a problem this year in the sense that it had a problem last year. What it suffers from is a little bit of a lack of development. When you’re running your wind tunnels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as pretty well everyone is now, and in our case it’s a single wind tunnel, it’s hard to find extra time. We stopped development of last year’s car early, we released this year’s car a little bit later than we have done in previous years, and all of that was to try and make up time. It wasn’t enough, and I think that where we lack now is simple aerodynamic efficiency, the sort of week on week improvements that you make. We just need a few more weeks to make them and it’s very hard because it means that all the time you have to be improving at a greater rate than your rivals and these are pretty tough rivals sitting round me.
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