GP Australia preview with Tonio

Following an encouraging showing at the 2010 season opener in Bahrain, Tonio now heads to Australia in a buoyant mood for the second round of the FIA Formula One World Championship. His aim is to get into Q3, and of course, to score some points, just like he did in Bahrain. And with a few new developments on the front and rear wing of the car, this just may happen again…

Tonio, Bahrain was a great result for you and the team. How was it from your perspective?
“Overall the whole weekend was positive. We learned a lot about the tyres and how they perform in the warm temperatures and also how far we can push the fuel in the race. I was a bit disappointed with qualifying in that we never got a clear lap, but the race was encouraging and was a great result for the team and myself. The team has worked so hard over the winter to find improvements and never gave up pushing so to get two points in the first race is fantastic. They are a team that is focussed, knows what they are doing and how to get there so they really deserve it to have good results on a regular basis. This is just the start.”

There’s some new upgrades coming for Australia as well. Do you think this could push you further up the field?
“We have some new developments on the front and rear wing. I’m pretty hopeful it will be a step forward as every upgrade we made last year was positive, so the correlation from the wind tunnel seems to be working well. Of course you never know what the others are bringing but I would hope this would move us a little closer to the teams in front. My target would be to get into Q3 this time out and then, of course, get into the points again.”

Australia will be a twilight race again, with the start at 17:00hrs. From a driver’s perspective is this an issue or a particular challenge?
“It wasn’t a real problem last year – there was just one corner where the sun was very low and it was maybe a bit harder to see but everywhere else it was OK. The real challenge is that it can be critical with the temperature as the sun goes goes down and when you are on the harder tyre you start to have warm-up problems. But I think Bridgestone have worked on this now and so I am not worried about this. We’ll look through the findings from Bahrain and see what we can do.”