By Site Staff (23/01/03)
January 23 2003

Toyota new boy, Cristiano da Matta, is flavour of the month with the sporting press at the moment, all keen to find out his impressions of the sport and how he feels he will do in his rookie year. F1-live.com caught up with him this week to get some answers. Since winning the 2002 CART Championship in America, Cristiano has been busy making himself familiar with Formula 1, the Toyota team, and F1 machinery. CART, in the main, appears to be a good proving ground for Formula 1 talent with the most recent graduate, Juan Pablo Montoya, putting some fire back into the sport with his wheel-to-wheel battles. F1-live.com asked how he thought he would fit in ? "I certainly hope so," he was quoted as saying. "For me to drive in Formula 1 is a challenge, and it will take me some time to learn everything properly, but I aim to become as competitive as possible as quickly as possible. "There are many differences between F1 and CART," he explained. "I think the main one is definitely the size of a Formula 1 team compared to the size of a CART team. On the technical side, I think that Formula 1 is a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more diverted to technology and from the car point of view, I think the weight of the car and grooved tyres are the biggest differences." The sport of F1 is quite different now in comparison to the time when da Matta first became involved with Toyota due to the new rules recently implemented by the FIA. F1-live was interested in how these new rule would affect Cristiano's first year ? "With the one-lap qualifying rule, we will see some pretty quick guys in the middle of the action fighting their way to the front, so I hope there is more overtaking. I think the new changes to the F1 regulations will help in this respect. It'll be challenging but I am looking forward to it. "I have some experience of this kind of qualifying from ovals, so it is not totally new to me, but now I am in a new team and a new car with new tracks. I think that getting to learn the track as quick as possible is going to be a little bit of a challenge, but at the moment I am fully focussed on learning the car and just getting used to everything. Of course this year, I am going to have less time to learn the tracks that are new to me than I would have had in previous years because of the new rules. Certainly it will be more difficult at tracks like Albert Park than at circuits I already know, but we have plenty of pre-season tests for me to get to know the car, so I am relatively confident. "We still have around 5 test sessions to do before we head off to Australia, but I can't wait to get started. Pre-season testing is really important to develop the car to its best for the opening races, but nothing compares to actually racing." This site is definitely looking forward to Toyota's 2003 season, and will be watching Cristiano's progress with interest.