After the rather different Australian GP,
where David Coulthard managed to bring his McLaren Mercedes
home in first position after being 11th on the grid, there
were certain people saying just how great the new qualifying
system was, and how it had enlivened the racing, with dices
and passing going on all the way through the order.
Juan
Pablo Montoya
Unfortunately that was not quite the true
facts. Even Coulthard admitted that he did not pass anybody on
his trip to the front! His own team’s designer, McLaren guru
Adrian Newey said on the British BBC Sport website,
“Melbourne was a good race on TV, but that was because of
the weather, not the rules.”
The driver who should have won was the
fiery Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya, who saw his grasp on the
top step of the podium slip away when the field got bunched up
again in safety car periods and then he really threw it away
with a spin with only a handful of laps to go.
Montoya is a fairly direct and
uncomplicated character, and I think you will agree after
reading this transcript of the post-race press conference. He
was asked what he thought of the race and he replied, “I
think it was a pretty disastrous race. We took the right tyres,
I had a 16-second lead, and everything was going my way. Then
the safety car, then we went again, I had like 10 or something
like that second lead and safety car again, so I pretty much
got screwed twice. Even like that, after the second pit stop I
had the lead and, I don’t know, I went into turn one and
picked up the throttle, the car turned ends on me, so just my
fault.”
Q: “In that second pit stop, you didn’t
change tyres, it looked as if you hit the lollipop as you left
as well. Was the not changing of tyres in any way a factor in
the spin?”
JPM: “Probably yes and no, because the
previous run on new tyres the pattern was a disaster and on
old tyres I had a much better balance, I was more competitive,
so I decided not to change tyres and I thought it was the
right thing to do. And I still think it was the right thing to
do; I would have been even less competitive if I would have
changed tyres. So it was just, basically sh*t happens.”
Q: “Juan, it seemed in pre-season testing
for a lot of the time you were struggling with this new car,
but suddenly it seems a lot better. Was it just circumstances
or did finally some breakthrough come about?”
JPM: “No, if you look at the lap time we
did in Jerez, look at the lap time we did in Valencia, the
only place we kind of struggle a little bit at the moment is
Barcelona and everywhere else we have been competitive. I
think it’s just the press, because day one the car wasn’t
quick and everybody will tell us day one is going to break the
lap record around Barcelona, everybody said the Williams sucks
but it doesn’t. It’s true. It needs a lot of work the car,
the car’s got a lot more potential, I think there’s a lot
more things coming through aerodynamically to make the car
more competitive during the race. As you saw today, our lap
time yesterday wasn’t on low fuel. I think a lot of people
thought we had quite low fuel and I didn’t and the pace was
there so it’s quick.”
Of course, for once, Mrs Schumacher’s
eldest boy wasn’t on the podium, so we do not really know
what he thought of it all. Undoubtedly he had the potential to
win, but after his bargeboards shook themselves to death, he
was not going to be in the hunt. Even his team manager Jean
Todt was philosophical after the race. With Barichello
attempting to prove himself and leave his mark this year, it
was ironic that the only mark he left was a big red splodge on
an Albert Park wall! Definitely not the Scuderia’s best
outing.
What else did we learn? Well, we found out
that the BAR team have a problem with communications, with
both drivers arriving at the pits at the same time! Jenson
Button, in the second car, who was held up for something like
13 seconds was furious, blaming team mate Jacques Villeneuve
for deliberately sabotaging his chances by diving pit-wise
before him, even though the team had not told him to come in.
Team boss David Richards will have had a few unkind words to
say before the next race this weekend in Malaysia.
Jaguar, even though both drivers failed to
finish, showed some promise with Mark Webber up to 4th at one
stage before rear suspension failure sidelined the popular
Australian. Pizzonia suffered the same failure on his Jaguar,
but the team will have corrected that before Sepang.
