TEAM REPRESENTATIVES - Giorgio ASCANELLI (Toro Rosso), Eric BOULLIER (Renault), Stefano DOMENICALI (Ferrari), Tim GOSS (McLaren), Peter SAUBER (Sauber)
PRESS CONFERENCE
Q. Eric, first of all, Bruno Senna had a fantastic start in Spa with a great qualifying performance. What has he brought to the team and we will come to the commercial side of that in a moment?
Eric BOULLIER: Nothing.
Q. But in terms of his presence?
EB: I don't know. I think his eagerness and freshness is clearly a good asset, a good new value for the team, which we didn't have during the summer and were struggling a little bit with the development of the car. Now it looks like we are back a little bit and are in a good shape and clearly Bruno brought with him his enthusiasm. He knows the team very well as he was working very closely with the team since January.
Q. Presumably, that presence since January had made him popular and that is why people are pleased to see him in the car?
EB: Yeah, exactly. He has spent a lot of time in the back of the garage, in the trucks, with the engineers and the mechanics and he was very helpful as well for the race drivers as he was clearly committed and dedicated to help and pushing for the team so the team knew him and was pleased to see him doing well in qualifying.
Q. You have four new commercial partnerships, two of which have Brazilian connections. Just talk about those.
EB: Everybody thinks Bruno came with a bunch of money, which is wrong, obviously. The only link was Embratel. Yes, Embratel was a personal sponsor of Bruno and this is clearly linked to Bruno. This is clear, nothing to hide. The two others, or the three others actually, are not related to Bruno. We were talking to them for a long time and the opportunity when we told them Bruno would be racing they just decided to do an 'mediatic shot' and use the opportunity to have this 'mediatisation' and just go for it.
Q. What are your plans for Romain Grosjean, as there were thoughtshe might be in the car, though may be not from you?
EB: Some people were thinking for me, which is good. I appreciate sometimes, sometimes not. Romain had a job to do to be a GP2 Champion. He is now officially the third driver and we will see what happens to him but there is no plan for him.
Q. So he will come to all the remaining races?
EB: Yep, definitely. As the third driver.
Q. Peter, looking at your team which direction would you like it to go in from now? Is it a financial direction? Where would you like improvement? Financial, technical, resources, where do you see the effort being applied now?
Peter SAUBER: Forward.
Q. Just forward?
PS: Just forward. I think the infrastructure is excellent and, of course, with more money we can be faster. In our case it is very easy.
Q. Do you want more staff?
PS: Yes, it is possible to have more. We have about 280 and it is an advantage to have more staff.
Q. Just tell us about the performance today. We saw Kamui Kobayashi pull off right at the end of practice, but up until then the performance was possibly better than you thought it was going to be?
PS: It is better than we expected, yes. Kamui, I think was a transmission problem. But the speed was good today, especially the long runs.
Q. Why did you think you were not going to be particularly good here?
PS: I think our problem is the hot-blowing diffuser, the hot-blowing exhaust. That's our problem. The system doesn't work very well and then we stopped the whole development around Barcelona as in this time, not only us, we had the opinion that it will be forbidden from Silverstone onward.
Q. Talk about the Mexican connection you have with Sergio Pérez and Esteban Gutierrez. How is that coming along?
PS: The relationship with Telmex is excellent. We are very happy with Pérez. Don't forget he is a rookie and he is a part of the Telmex family. We are also happy with Telmex as they opened the door to different and other companies in this region.
Q. Do you see that going a bit further next year?
PS: Sure.
Q. Further, as in my first question, so you will have the few more staff that you require?
PS: We hope so. Believe me, it's not easy.
Q. Tim, looking back at the last race, at Spa, what sort of indicators did you get from Spa in terms of the setup of the car and the specification of the car for this race?.
Tim GOSS: The pace of the car has been very good over recent races and we have been pushing Red Bull quite hard. Clearly going to Spa it was a lower downforce and we brought a sort of new breed of rear wing. We have abandoned the concept we were working on. Well not necessarily abandoned it but we have switched to a different concept for the lower-downforce wings and we are quite pleased with our pace. Obviously we would have liked to come out of Spa with a better result in the race. We felt that we were very strong during the race and could have challenged for a win. Certainly we were looking good for a podium. Car pace was very good. Had we avoided the mistakes we made in qualifying then Jenson (Button) should have been up there rather than having to do the 20-30 overtakes to get to third place. We have discovered a bit of a sweet spot with the car. Those themes that we know work well with our car we are pushing now and looking forward to taking those further similar developments on this season.
Q. In terms of Spa to here, was there much change?
TG: Yeah, I mean it is a lower-downforce circuit again so we have brought further developments to this circuit as well as just the Monza specific package so today's pace looked very good and we are confident that the changes we've made have actually brought us that little performance step that we are after.