Italy: Rubens Barrichello Race Q&A

Rubens, you have won here for Ferrari and now you have won here for Brawn. What a feeling for you.

It feels great. Like I said on the lap after I got the chequered flag I have no words. I mean I had a tough night. We did not know the gearbox. This or that. We did have an overtorque in Spa and there are some concerns but the gearbox is great. I think it is going to do the whole four races. I really hope. It was great to have a great start. Obviously (Heikki) Kovalainen was coming quite fast with that power button and I had to defend myself and I went wide, so it was a bit tough. But it was a great first lap and it made my race. My pace was there. My brakes were. It was pretty much like Valencia. The car was there all the time. It felt great and I have no big words for that. I just feel really good to see all this public. Obviously they are more in red than white but it still feels great.

Jock Clear, your race engineer, was saying on your in-lap that great decisions were taken this weekend. Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Räikkönen were on the two-stop strategy, but you two Brawn drivers were on the one-stop strategy.

Yeah, it was a great decision yesterday. The guys with the KERS they had 20 metres on us at the start and we had to have that in mind. There will be times when we don’t have to think that, but the straight line after the start here was so big that we had to think of that. Luckily we had a good start and I could run my pace. The pace was good enough to be in front of them by the last pit stop.

You are the oldest man in Formula One, 37 years of age. What a rebirth of your career. What an amazing achievement.

It feels great. I think it is a winning year whatever happens. We have got to remember that it is not long ago we had no jobs. We did not know what is going to happen, so we are finally driving a fantastic car with a fantastic engine. The team are doing a fantastic job. I must thank them for all of their efforts. The strategy was great. It was really good. The work that we put in on Friday was fantastic to achieve this car. You can see that we both had different tyres, different strategies on tyres. But at the end of the day the car was good on both of them. So it just feels great, I am going to give my very best. It is going to be a good and a healthy fight and I am looking forward to that.

Two wins in three races. That is pretty good going, isn’t it?

It is very good going. It is not as good as the six races that Jenson had, but it is good enough. I am really happy with all the achievement since the beginning of the year. I struggled a little bit at the beginning with the brakes but since we have changed it at Silverstone I am a lot happier with it. We had developments on the car since then and the car has become better and better. I need to put it down to the braking that my performance has become a little bit better. I am feeling good. Monza is a great track for me. We knew since before coming here that I had a good chance. It feels great. I finish the race and I have now words as I had a tough night. You are thinking all through. I didn’t know about the gearbox and this and that. I am not even thinking we are going to have to change it for the future. It is doing very well. I had no troubles whatsoever and it is just a great feeling.

What was the worry about the gearbox?

In Spa. It has nothing to do with the fire. It is the fact that I hit anti-stall the next time when it got going and it had a little bit of an overtorque. An overtorque might mean something for the long term but I think the will to win was bigger than the problem really. It felt good all the way through. I had a great first lap. That’s what made my day and my weekend.

Looking at the races coming up, do you think the Brawns are going to be competitive at those as well?

I think so. I think Singapore can be quite good. It is warm weather and part of the race is at eight o’clock. It was eight pm last year, I think. It was still quite hot. The sun is not there, I think we can expect to perform quite well there. We have Suzuka that might be cold and Abu Dhabi, strangely enough, they told us it could be cold. I cannot imagine going to Abu Dhabi with the cold weather but it might happen. I think Brazil can be quite good for us as well. I think the package is good. We have been the team winning the most, but the most consistent team as well. Where we didn’t do very well we still did okay, so thanks to everyone at the factory and everyone here that we have a great car.

Looking back when you saw the weights, was the feeling then that we are looking good?

I think I can say for myself and for Jenson that we both did a very good lap yesterday. With the amount of fuel that we had in the car I think it was a great achievement. When you talk about the hundredths or thousands it is down to a little bit of luck. There is nothing between us. I was just lucky that I had a touch more and I could stop a lap later. Even Friday, some people come and say they have problems and this and that but Friday was different to the beginning of the year. Some people are taking some fuel out and putting some good laps in while we have been conservative and good and looking after everything as we have to. Saturday we were fast and I think we could have achieved pole position if we had the same load as the other people but we had the best strategy and the 10 points is at the end of the race. That is when it counts.

It looks like it’s between you and Jenson now, the Red Bulls are so far back. Is it possible to continue to be friends and close team-mates, exchanging information when you’ve got four races to go and you need every point possible?

If it is between us two, there’s that old saying that you can only win in Formula One if you’re tough. We’re both nice guys, so this is the end of it! I think the best thing in life is respect. Obviously, when we’re finding that the softer spring or the harder spring is the better thing for the car, you go to the other side of the garage and tell them that’s what you have found. But it’s an open book there. We have our meetings and we both go through the check list at the same time, live, so we both can hear. At the end of the day, the cars get very similar but that’s fine, that’s how it is.

After all the frustrating years at Ferrari when you couldn’t race your team-mate and we know what happened to you there, how much do you relish this opportunity to go head-to-head with your team-mate with the championship fully within your grasp and four races to go? What does that mean to you?

It means a lot. It means that I can show my true me. For many years people may ask why didn’t he leave Ferrari before, because the car was the best available and I had to overcome all the problems and I had to overcome some World Champion called Michael (Schumacher) and he was great, he was great behind the wheel. Like I said before, I think that Michael might have had more skill than I had, but if you threw both of us into a goal with a tiger I might get out alive and I’m not so sure about him. That’s life. You learn, you learn by your mistakes, you learn by everything. I didn’t say this to criticise because I had fun, I really had fun at Ferrari. It made me a better driver as well, so everything that’s happening now is because of all the times that I had in Formula One. The only thing that is more important than anything else is that you have to believe in yourself and that’s the main thing, the whole thing in life itself. It’s you waking up, thanking for the chance that you have and going for it. It’s as good as that and as I said before, for me it’s already a winning year. I went through the first of January, I went through the first of February, not knowing if I was going to be racing. I remember like it was yesterday. Jenson did the first four laps in the car and I went to ask him (about the car) and he said ‘it’s a great car.’ And I will never forget that. And I said ‘get the hell out of there, I want to drive!’ It was a great feeling and it’s a winning year already. It feels good to be challenging and fighting your team-mate.

What do you have to do to try to catch Jenson: it’s four races, fourteen points which is quite a lot? What do you have to do and what kind of pressure do you think you can put on him?

Nothing more than I’m doing right now: pushing to the limit, taking everything you can, feeling good, feeling happy with the challenge and just going for it. Experience does help with all those years but as I’ve already said, if you have experience and no speed it means nothing. If you have speed, experience comes and it feels good. I don’t think I have to do anything else. We are very competitive, both of us, and we just have to go for it.

I guess you started the race on the harder tyre. Normally the Brawn was not the best car warming up the tyres, but you were the only one on the first lap who really did a good lap on the hard, all the others really suffered, so what is different now?

Well, I think the team made a great effort on the set-up to find where the problem was in that couple of races including Hungary where we struggled. It was a great effort from the mechanical and aerodynamic side and the car is better. Secondly, it was a good (tyre) choice because I had a great feeling with the tyres yesterday. I was surprised that we could qualify so well on the harder tyre. We were quite heavy at the start and I wanted the more consistent tyre. Having said that, I opened up a gap… it looked like I had the soft and Jenson had the hard because I opened up a gap and then he started to catch me up slightly. I lost a little bit of rear stability on the harder tyre towards the end of the run which was not something I was expecting. When I put on the softer tyre, the car felt good, felt really good, a bit of movement into Parabolica but the tyre felt very good, so I was keeping good pace and the car felt good.

When you were up on the podium, it looked like you were firing arrows into the crowd. What was that about?

I invent all the time. Fernando was four yesterday, so that was for him.