Q: Mario, looking at this year’s championship, are you confident that the future circuits are going to be better suited than say Hungary, Monaco – the tighter tracks?
Mario ALMONDO: Of course, I believe that we are making a lot of effort in the right direction. Since the beginning of the season, we knew we would have some circuits which are more difficult than others, and up to now what we probably saw is almost exactly what we were forecasting. By the end of the year, I think that we will have a good possibility of winning races and the development that we are still pushing is something that gives us a bit of extra boost in order to be really competitive and winning because what we have to do is just that.
Q: Pole position seems to be vital – qualifying is vital to be on the front row, preferably on pole. How much can you concentrate on that, how much are you concentrating on that, in comparison to the race effort itself?
MA: I have to say that it is always difficult to answer in the proper way to this question because every race is a balance between being on the first row and having the right possibility of having a good strategy. Monza is a good example. It’s very important to be on the first row but it’s also important to make the right decision in terms of fuel, so this is what we are thinking about very deeply for tomorrow. We have several possibilities to explore. We are going to do that. Of course, we had some indication from the qualifying, from the tests of today, and we will see what the best option is and will decide tomorrow.
Q: A question now to you all: you’ve all done a fantastic job in your various teams to make the cars incredibly reliable, as we saw here a couple of years ago: 22 cars finished; as we saw two weeks ago when 21 cars finished. But it does mean that, as Pat is very fond of saying, you spend two days trying to put the fastest car on the front of the grid, it’s very difficult for anyone to overtake and if you start 14th, you’re not likely to get any World Championship points. Is there any engineering challenge, is there a balance somewhere where perhaps engineering is more challenged to make better racing, to make more interesting racing, to give everybody a chance of winning points? Is there an engineering challenge to perhaps shake up the order during the race itself?
MA: I have to say firstly that I share what my colleagues said because starting from the sporting rules, I have to say that the sporting rules gives you the boundaries of your technical problems. Then, once these rules are clear enough, you have to develop and do your engineering in order to achieve the fastest car. So this is the first thing. I think the second step then is that you have to do your best job in terms of technical effort, investing your money in the direction that is defined in the sporting rules. Secondly, probably it’s better to say that once you have your clear direction, everything is related not only to the reliability, because having reliable cars is just giving you in reality the possibility to see a race where all the cars are reliable and finishing the race. The point is that also in this case probably the sporting rules have to be more difficult in order to give the possibility to everyone to be reliable. If you, for example, impose a rule that is all the weekend long with a car that can be, in a certain way, changed or parts changed, I’m sure that the reliability, as aside from the engineering point of view, is more difficult and then the reliability will have another level, so it’s something that is always a two-way problem.
QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
Q: (Stéphane Barbé – L’Equipe) To all of you, as technical directors who are working very hard to get performance from the car how high would you rate in terms of cheating the fact that a team could have obtained technical information from another team?
MA: if you get a lot of technical data of another car it is not a matter of single details that you would like or not of the other car, trying to imitate what the other team did, but it is a matter of knowing references… If I know the weight distribution of another car, the efficiency, how powerful is the engine and so on, then I know my references and know exactly where to put our resources. So I have a higher possibility of arriving at the same result if I am behind or even a better result if I am quicker and with less energy spent, less money and in a quicker time, so for sure it is an advantage to just know things and how the other works because it is a sort of technical gift in this respect.
Q: (Panos Diamantis – Car and Driver) A question for Mr Symonds and for Mr Almondo: We saw your teams have problems with wind tunnels this year. Do you think that aerodynamics has gone over the limit in Formula One? And, secondly, would you like a second wind tunnel?
MA: A wind tunnel is like several other industrial plants all over the world – something that can be used 24 hours a day and seven days a week – so I don’t think we have reached the limits and sometimes we have problems and these we just have to accept. The second matter I think is a balance of how much you want to spend and what is the benefit. From a general point of view, I have to say that it is more sensible to imagine a Formula One with a limit on spending money and this of course has to be helped from the general point of view, from the rules, because otherwise you have just the budget limited. So a support from the rules is beneficial in this respect because it gives you a picture that is more used in a better way – a plant that can be used by all the teams instead of having bigger and bigger plants that is bringing you costs but not investing in quality, just in quantity.
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