By Ferrari Press Office
March 5 2005

Ferrari's head man Jean Todt talks in depth about the first round of qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix. Todt talks about how the weather affected the performance of his drivers and how he is not the biggest fan of the new qualifying format.

“A lottery” is how Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro managing director, Jean Todt described today’s first ever qualifying session run under the new 2005 rules. In fact, rules and regulations had little meaning on a day when the only deciding factor was the weather. Rain in the morning had left the Albert Park circuit damp as qualifying got underway. The first cars out on track were the two Minardis, now allowed to take part having modified their cars to comply with this year’s new technical regulations. After the first four or five cars had made their runs, the surface was beginning to dry.

The biggest winner was Giancarlo Fisichella, who running 12th was able to fit dry weather tyres. His time would never be beaten and so the Italian is on provisional pole on his debut with the Renault team. Felipe Massa was next out for Sauber and heavy rain reappeared as he was on his timed lap. This meant that Michael Schumacher, who was about to go out of the pits only just had time to switch back to rain tyres, with the Scuderia mechanics working flat out to get their driver on track in the 30 second time limit allowed for a driver to exit pit lane. As the German completed his “out” lap, the conditions got even worse and Michael later admitted he would have done better on the extreme wet tyres.

The session was then red flagged for six minutes, as Takuma Sato crashed his BAR-Honda into the barriers and with plenty of rain still on track, Barrichello made his run on extreme wets. The Ferrari result: The Brazilian in 12th place and the German in 18th, one lower than his brother. The lap times sum up the track conditions better than words: Fisichella 1’33”171; Michael Schumacher 1’57”931. That’s a difference of 18.3 seconds!

Naturally, the rest of the top six behind Fisichella are made up of other drivers who caught the track at the right time: Jarno Trulli (Renault,) Mark Webber (Williams) to the great delight of the home crowd, Jacques Villeneuve (Sauber) and the Red Bull Racing duo of Christian Klien and David Coulthard.

Of course, these changeable conditions have affected qualifying in the past. But the big difference now is that grid positions are decided by aggregating the two times from both sessions and not even Michael and Rubens can make up these sort of gaps in tomorrow morning’s final qualifying.

With rain still a possibility for Sunday, maybe the drivers would do better to decide their grid positions with a throw of the dice in Melbourne’s famous Casino!

Never giving up is very definitely part of Ferrari’s work ethic and despite today’s unlucky setback, both Rubens and Michael remain optimistic about the race. “The new rules mean that grid position is slightly less important than in the past, so I am still confident we can have a good race,” said Barrichello. Schumacher even hinted that a podium finish, although very difficult to achieve, might not be impossible.




Ferrari Press Office
05 Mar 2005