Ron in Friday Press Conference

By Karl King
March 11 2006

Ron Dennis took part in a Friday Press Conference at Bahrain yesterday, accompanied by Toro Rosso's Gerhard Berger, Renault's Flavio Briatore, The man behind Super Aguri, Suzuki Aguri and Ferrari principal Jean Todt. Here is what Ron had to say:

Q: Ron, the times show you as 12th and 13th today; where do you think you should be?
Ron DENNIS: Twelfth and 13th, that’s what the lap times say. As Flavio said, there is an unusually mixed grid. There are people who are focusing on their correct qualifying strategy from 10th to 22nd which is clearly different from 1st to tenth. Those people can obviously qualify with low fuel, not having to worry about race fuel set-ups, because they can add fuel afterwards. There are a lot of people who have been testing here. There are people such as us. We ran our tyre comparison this morning, so it was a pretty dirty circuit, but our underlying performance is quite good. I think at the moment we have no concerns. It was a bit frustrating that we had an electronic box failure on Kimi’s car which is the first in years. It’s been several years, literally, since we’ve had that sort of failure so I’m not too concerned about that. I think tomorrow, hopefully everyone will see, it will be a very different picture.

Q: I was going to ask about reliability. Presumably you hoped you’d beaten those problems that you had in testing?
RD: We’ve actually had a lot of reliability over the last two weeks so it’s a bit frustrating to suffer the embarrassment of a failure today but no one’s perfect and it’s very frustrating for us but it’s not too serious.

Q: What about the drivers, how have they changed over the year?
RD: Juan Pablo’s really been working very hard through the winter trying to raise his game and time will tell if he’s been successful in that. Kimi’s had three months off which is, I think, something which he enjoyed a great deal. Different things suit different people and getting away from it is Kimi’s way of recharging his batteries. Other drivers like to train hard and hit the ground running, but at the end of the day, it’s about qualifying and racing, it’s not really about what takes place in winter.