By Nick Sparkes
April 2 2006

Ralf Schumacher's third place means he had to sit in the after race press conference, alongside Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen. Ralf's excellent drive also earned him ITV's - Martin Brundle's - Driver Of The Day. Here is what Ralf had to say on...

Q: Ralf, with a stop-go and where you came from in Bahrain and Malaysia, this almost feels like a win for you…
Ralf Schumacher: Oh yes, yeah. You can imagine, we are all very happy with what we achieved today. As you said, the drive-through was because of my mistake because I didn’t hit the limiter button. But I was lucky that due to the safety car I think we achieved a lot more than we ever thought before this weekend.

Q: The safety car allowed you to regain some time after that stop-go and you also picked up some places in the final safety car period just before the yellows came out…
Ralf Schumacher: I thought we only had the (tyre) warm-up problems this weekend, but it looked like some Michelin runners had the same problem. Jenson struggled and Nick as well. So Nick went off and I was able to get by and that obviously gave me another position. With all the backmarkers in between us, it was a bit of a fight really, but yeah, we went through and finished third. It was great.

Q: Looked like you had a very spectacular phase on those opening laps…
Ralf Schumacher: Similar thing you know: we were all sliding so I just saw a lot of locking wheels and stuff like that. It was very interesting, very difficult for me today because the car grip was never really there to fight the whole race, to keep it there but it worked out.

Q: Where do you think Toyota are? Do you think you are back to where you were in 2005?
Ralf Schumacher: I think we had a good result today, but we were far away from the top teams, I guess. I have seen the lap times and we have to work, but I have no doubt at all that our crew is able to do that. We’re strong people and they are really pushing hard so I’m looking forward to the next few races.

Q: Ralf, it is Mike Gascoyne’s birthday today and I am sure he is very happy to see you on the podium. It is a great birthday present for him and for you after the disappointments of the first couple of races…
Ralf Schumacher: I am sure he will have a long night ahead of him on the plane and he will use that opportunity! It has been great for us and we had a particularly difficult start to the season, but we are still fighting to get our performance back and today we were a bit lucky at the same time. We had a decent pace but still too far away from where we should have been and that is clear. Nevertheless, I am pretty happy with what I achieved and for the guys. I mean they worked very hard over the winter and we were disappointed at the first race and second so this is quite good for them.

Q: You lost a couple of places after the first safety car. Is that the incident you were describing just now?
Ralf Schumacher: The tyre warm-up was particularly difficult today. I had the pleasure of seeing a car spinning twice in front of me while he was trying to warm up his tyres. I took it easy, maybe too easy, and that is why I lost a lot at the first one, but I got it back at the third safety car, which then really helped.

Q: Do you think you can repeat this in the forthcoming races?
Ralf Schumacher: Imola is going to be coldish temperatures again and so it is going to be difficult to judge for the moment with the problems we have. I mean on Friday we struggled a bit and worked overnight on set up and got it right on Saturday so it could happen at Imola. There are two tests before then, so we have time to work on it and we try to stay where we are.