Showdown

With 15 minutes to go for the race to begin, I found some interesting comments made by Renault engineering director Pat Symonds here. I will just copy the relevant parts here :

"My main concern really is the times Michael did on Saturday morning with old tyres, just before he changed to new tyres," Renault engineering director Pat Symonds told Autosport. "It makes it look like their tyre degradation is going to cause us real problems to do anything with today."

After Schumacher's victory in Imola the team conducted many simulations to see if they could have done anything differently to match the Ferrari's pace on old tyres, but to no avail.

"I am not saying that we could have done better," said Symonds, "But you still learn a little about the approach and what to look for. And here we were looking very, very carefully at what their (Ferrari's) time was on old tyres, and it scared me when I saw it."

The Bridgestone tyres seemed to cause some slight understeer problems for the other teams, but Ferrari was far from crippled by the issues in qualifying. "Ferrari are amazing," said Renault boss Flavio Briatore after qualifying. "The Michelin tyre is working very well here and it looks like Bridgestone only works with Ferrari. It is something really, really strange. It is something that we need to think about."

Race on !