Rubens Barrichello arrived in Miami yesterday, for a few days rest and to beat the jet-lag, prior to travelling up the United States Eastern Seaboard to Montreal on Wednesday, where the next round of the world championship takes place on Sunday 15th.

Looking back at the last race, Barrichello regards the Monaco Grand Prix as a disappointment to put behind him as he prepares for the second half of the season. “It was not a good event for me, because in the race, I effectively only had a few laps to perform in a way to improve my situation,” recalled the Brazilian. “But in the end, that didn’t happen because of traffic. At the start of the race, I was not pushing that hard, as I was keen to save fuel to go for the long first stint. Then the balance of the car was not great, but really the deciding factor was that I encountered three slower cars on the three laps when I should have been pushing to the maximum.”

With Michael Schumacher scheduled to take a break, it was Barrichello who joined the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro test driver Felipe Massa, for testing at the Monza circuit this week. “We were running a ‘Canada’ aerodynamic package,” revealed Rubens. “I was doing competitive times so the results are impressive. Aerodynamic testing is always very interesting; trying different wing angles and other configurations. Monza is good in this respect, as it has very fast straights, which allow you to see the correlation of the results on the track and those achieved in the wind tunnel at the factory.”

Driver feedback is very important on the aero front, even though the car transmits so much data to the engineers. However, the testing process is not straightforward, as the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver explains: “When running an aero package at one track to race it on another, you have to keep thinking about what you need for the Montreal circuit in this case and not get too involved in how it functions at Monza. You have to ask the car a lot of questions and it gives you a lot of answers. The key is selecting the right ones.”

This week’s test session was not just about aerodynamics and Barrichello was also encouraged by the work the team did with Bridgestone. “From the tyre point of view for Canada it was also a useful couple of days work, as the results we got in terms of tyre evaluation in Monza matched those from our team running the same tyres in Fiorano.”