lCALM NECESSARY - ”I couldn’t have imagined such a difficult start – he explained -. We're not satisfied from any angle. There’s a lot to learn from this sort of situation, in terms of the team, reliability and drivers. We’re lucky to be able to respond immediately in Malaysia. We need to be calm, concentrated and very rational in this situation because it’s easy to become overly emotional. However we just need to work and understand the things that haven’t gone well. Reliability was an essential factor and the fact of having broken the engine on both cars is hardly a cause for calm. This evening the V8’s will go immediately to Maranello so we can understand what happened. We weren’t geniuses beforehand, but if you’ll excuse the turn of phrase, we’ve not become dumbos now.”

KIMI DISAPPOINTED - “Certainly it’s not great not to finish a race – said Raikkonen – but nevertheless winning a point (thanks to Barrichello’s disqualification; ed.) is always better than nothing, even though obviously it’s not what we wanted. I don’t know what happened to the engine. We have to check it.” However there were also human errors. “I went off when I tried to overtake Kovalainen and I span on another occasion. All these things don’t count when you don’t finish the race. The car performed well when I was able to drive it without other cars about, so I believe it is competitive even though we’ve had our problems here. It certainly is not the best way to start but this was not the real Ferrari. It’s been a difficult weekend.”

MASSA AS WELL - Massa was very disappointed. “It’s been a bad day, a good deal worse than we’d have thought. We didn’t expect a start like that. It was a very strange race full of dramatic twists right from the first corner: I went up too many gears. I accelerated and didn’t manage to keep control because I went in first. Seeing how the car performed we could have recovered to be in the points. However, then there was the Coulthard incident. “I overtook on the inside – Felipe explained – and perhaps he didn’t see me.” And finally the withdrawal. “We had engine problems on three cars, including Bourdais’ Red Bull whose engines we supply. It’s not good already to have reliability problems. We know very well the effect this can have during the season. It’s strange: during the winter we did many kilometres of high temperature bench-tests without problems. It’s been a surprise. Now we must understand what happened.”

gasport