Most people will be surprised in Melbourne - Vasselon

This weekend, the 2007 Formula One World Championship season will finally kick-off at the street circuit in Melbourne. Toyota's Senior General Manager Chassis, Pascal Vasselon, talks about the first GP of the season and the work done during the winter.

"Albert Park means low grip and understeer basically. At least in the last few years where the tyre war was going on, the typical characteristics in Melbourne were understeer, graining and generally low grip. It is caused by a combination of two major aspects of the track, the asphalt structure and the lay-out, especially the double right-hander in the last sector which is especially difficult for the front left tyre."

"Because of those characteristics, in the past it was quite difficult to achieve a perfect set-up. This season is going to be very different simply because one of the very clear character changes of the 2007 tyres is they don’t suffer any more from graining. So everything we know about Melbourne from the past probably needs to be reconsidered as we do not expect the 2007 tyres to grain at Albert Park."

"In one sense we will start from a clean sheet in terms of set-up. However, we are not totally starting from scratch because previous year’s experience showed the circuit at Valencia in winter is a decent representation of Melbourne in terms of the issues you face. We went to Valencia in January and tested the same spec of tyres we are going to run in Melbourne so that will help us."

"We have learnt all we can from tyres in winter conditions. We are operating them in the usual winter window but tyre issues in winter are different to those we experience later in the season. For this season, to compensate for the familiar winter tyre testing issues, we went to Bahrain and this gave us the first flavour of what challenges the tyres will give us during the season."

"What we know from these tyres is they bring oversteer into the car and if there is a weakness, it comes from the rear."

"Testing has not been without reliability issues but we believe most, if not all, of the reliability issues are under control as we showed with two very positive days testing in Jerez last week. In this area we can say we made proper usage of our testing. Also, we went through a learning phase with these new tyres together with our new car. It gave us the opportunity to develop different set-up options which we prepared according to the different conditions we will face during the season."

"At this stage, we can predict whatever we want but the only certain prediction is that most people will be surprised in Melbourne. Every season, if you compare February predictions to the results in the first races of the season, you see it is very hard to accurately anticipate based on winter testing. We are looking forward to this season with quite a lot of enthusiasm."

"You can talk a lot about Williams but they are just another of our competitors. Clearly, we have looked closely at their performances over the winter but we have studied all our competitors."

"At the moment we are not planning a TF107B but that does not mean we will not build one if we see a very good reason. We will have improvements at every race as has become normal in Formula 1 and there are some bigger upgrade packages coming on line during the season."