A great reward - Alan Permane
The Chief Engineer for the ING Renault F1 Team, Alan Permane, looks back on the team's weekend so far in Shanghai. Fernando Alonso will start the Chinese Grand Prix from second position on the grid, team mate Piquet from 17th.
"It has been a busy and extremely tiring weekend for the whole team. As you know, we took the decision to remove KERS from Fernando's car on Thursday and so we had to work late into the night to do this. Then on Friday we received the new diffuser and had to work through the night once again to get this on Fernando's car. The mechanics finished their work at 5:00am and got almost no sleep. In these conditions, the performance of Fernando in qualifying was a wonderful reward for everyone."
Does the diffuser bring the advantages you expected?"Yes, we haven't used it that much yet, but it seems to meet our expectations. There was a small hiccup this morning, when the new bodywork started to burn, but we sorted that immediately and did a good job to get the car ready for qualifying."
What do you expect from the race?"You've probably seen from the weights published by the FIA that Fernando is light. That means we will be running an aggressive strategy that we hope will pay us back. Fernando will have to attack in the first few laps, which is something that he enjoys. Of course, starting near the front our goal should be to win, however we have to be realistic and take one step at a time. Today we seem to have caught up with the level of the Toyota, which is a big step forward and we can be pleased with that."
