THEISSEN (BMW Sauber), Frank WILLIAMS (Williams)
PRESS CONFERENCE
Q: A question to you all. What are your feelings about the new regulations for this year?How they’ve worked, whether they’ve worked. Are they good or bad? Have they done what they were supposed to do?
Mario THEISSEN: My personal feeling is that they have not done what they ought to do. From the fans perspective it is certainly an exciting championship. We have a fresh pecking order, unexpectedly. But even more important the field has come very close together, just the opposite of what most people expected with the new regulations. If you look back in Bahrain, (Jarno) Trulli dominated qualifying, in Barcelona he just slipped in as P15 into Q2 with a gap of only 0.7 of a second behind the first, so that means nobody is safe. It is very exciting for the spectator and for us, sometimes too exciting. You see that almost every team goes out on two sets of fresh options even in first qualifying in order to make it into the second run. That is a scenario which no-one expected and which we haven’t seen in the past 10 years, so I think that is the upside. On overtaking maybe we had expected a bit more from the new regulations and on cost saving I think it has met about the expectations. The aero restrictions we currently have are not as tight as we thought they would be, so I think we could do more at this end.
Vijay MALLYA: I agree with what Mario said in terms of the racing being a lot more competitive, far more spectator-friendly from that point of view. For the smaller teams we have had a chance to close the gap quite significantly compared to previous years. I saw a couple of drivers who were actually quicker this year than last year which perhaps was not quite the intention. But having said that I think the 2009 regulations provided a good platform and base. As you well know there are further discussions continuing on how to deal with 2010 and beyond.
Norbert HAUG: I think it was fine so far. I think the chances and circumstances have been the same for everybody. Obviously some teams have been more busy towards the end of the year than during the season but this is not an excuse, it just explains a little bit that some cars on the track right now put more effort in but that is fair enough, that is how it is. We all need to play a little bit catch-up and I think lots of people have been surprised by the high level of the competitiveness of the new cars as Mario pointed out already and Vijay as well. The order is mixed. I think there were no presents made. Of course there were a lot of discussions about the diffuser but at the end of the day this is behind us. I think we saw some exciting races. The last one, Barcelona, was never a very interesting race in history. This is how things are. It is a challenging track and very demanding for the cars, especially for the aerodynamic of the cars and a mixture of everything. But it tends to be very boring around there and the last race was very similar, let’s say. But generally speaking I think we have seen more overtaking manoeuvres. I saw a statistic, so it is heading in the right direction. In fairness we have to admit that none of the KERS cars is currently in a position to win races and I think if that would be the case, or if you would think about a combination of very good car with very good KERS then that would probably be a different story. I hope obviously that we will be the ones that can move quickly in that direction, but catching up is a difficult process and certainly not achievable in a couple of weeks. It is rather months than weeks, so we need to be patient. Looking now at the results I think this is not a typical race track. We have always been quite good and quite strong around here, won quite a few races in the last years. But this is not a...
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