Panasonic Toyota Racing’s Jarno Trulli rounded out the 2007 Formula One season with a points scoring finish, the Italian racer happy with the fact that the Cologne based squad had secured the added motivation that comes with a top eight finish. Speaking to the team’s official website, Jarno reviewed his Brazilian grand Prix in depth.  

Eighth place in Brazil, was that a positive end to the season?

Yes, it was a positive result for me. The team has worked very hard all season but it had been a long time since we finished in the top eight for various reasons. It was good to finish the season back in the points and it gives us extra motivation as we work towards next season.

How did the weekend go as a whole?

For me the weekend actually started with quite a difficult Friday. From the start of practice I was not comfortable with the car and we seemed to have a few problems. The balance was okay but we just couldn’t seem to make the tyres work to their best. The wet track obviously did not help but we could see from Ralf’s performance that the conditions were not the only problem.

Were you able to solve the problem?

We switched to the T-car for Saturday and I felt much more comfortable after that. I have to say the team worked really hard to switch the cars and it was worth the effort because the set-up improved a lot. The car felt pretty good and was able to push hard.

Were you happy with your qualifying performance?

The car looked quite strong in qualifying so I was happy with that and I was pleased to be in 8th. We had no problems getting through Q1 and even though Q2 is always tight I was happy with my lap, which got me through to Q3 without any trouble. I think my final flying lap was pretty good considering our strategy and 8th wasn’t a bad result.

You went with a three-stop strategy for the race, did that work out?

The choice was to either go for two stops and run longer with the option tyre than ideally you would want to, or do an extra stop but use the option tyre less. I was not comfortable with using the super soft option tyre for a long period as we had encountered quite a lot of graining in practice so we decided to gamble on three stops. It was a risk because we spent more time in the pits than those on two stops so I had to keep up a good pace to stay in the fight for points. I think we made the right decision and we were rewarded with a decent result.