Hamilton confident to bounce back at Spain

Formula 1 racing arrives in Europe for the first time in 2008 as the 11 teams arrive at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya for the Spanish Grand Prix. The 2008 race is the 40th Formula 1 event to be staged in Spain, with 37 Spanish Grands Prix and two European events taking place to date. McLaren has won the Spanish round on eight occasions including four times with Mercedes-Benz.

Lewis Hamilton is confident to bounce back at Spain after a horrible desert race in Bahrain and Heikki Kovalainen hopes to repeat his strong results from the first three races.

“It’s always difficult to predict these things as all the teams are continuously progressing. Winter testing there was positive and this week we have covered a good amount of laps. I feel we have a competitive package at the track; the car seems to work quite well. We have a range of new components coming on board for this race which we tested this week and had some positive results, but we are not alone in doing this! The Circuit de Catalunya is a great track; we can’t ever lose it from the calendar. It always sees competitive racing and there are so many enthusiastic fans there all the time which makes for a great atmosphere.”

“The Circuit de Catalunya is a challenging track for the engineers and drivers. It has changed a little bit in character prior to last year’s Grand Prix. One of the key factors at this circuit is achieving a good balance through the variety of corners. Turn Two is a big corner and it provides a good challenge from both a driving and set-up perspective. With the end of the circuit now being tightened up a fair amount we have got to get that balance so we will get good high speed corner performance and traction coming out of the low speed corners. There are a range of different challenges and technically it is an interesting circuit.”

“I have been pretty busy since the last race, I have spent some time with the team at the McLaren Technology Centre, a couple of days of promotional work, I’ve done quite a bit of training and then I went to the Barcelona test. After that, I went home to do some more training. We have the opportunity in this gap to get some good work done in this area.”

“This circuit is one of probably the two most important test tracks we use, together with Jerez. It is a real performance tester; you need to have a really good aero performance in the car to go fast round here, which is why we always come here as it allows us to understand how well our aero package is performing. It also has some very heavy breaking areas, so it is good for evaluating this and some good corners to understand the balance of the car. Also, the slower chicanes mean we can test how the car changes direction. It has a good range of challenges so you can test everything. Also, usually the weather is good here.”

“I think turn 1 is best because you can drag the other car out of the new chicane that is quite slow, along the pit straight. Apart from that is it very difficult, you can probably think about overtaking into turn five, maybe into turn ten if you get a good run into turn nine, that is about it really.”

“It is really preparing physically for this race, because we have a bigger gap, we are actually trying to increase the fitness level. We do some power work, some speed work, a bit of cardio. That has been the priority. I have been to Woking for a couple of days and spent some time with the engineers. Apart from that, nothing special, just trying to make sure that when we arrive here for the race we know where we are and have a good starting point for the weekend.”