By Phil Huff
March 11 2006

Honda Racing F1 secured third and sixth on the Bahrain grid, with Jenson Button leading Rubens Barrichello. Gil de Ferran, the team's Sporting Director, gave his views immediately after the event on how Honda performed, and on the new qualifying system went. "I think we're in a good mood," commented Gil de Ferran on ITV. "I think it was a good qualifying session. Obviously we'd rather be on pole position, but Jenson in particular had a great session. We were really really close there, but not quite enough.

"Our ambition was to be on pole position, not to be on the second row. We gave it our best shot and we got beaten to it, but tomorrows another day."

Once concern was that Honda Racing F1 used a number of sets of tyres, with both drivers using two new sets in the final session. With a limited number available for use over the weekend, it could put the team at a disadvantage on race day.

"We have quite a lot more tyres to use this year," explained de Ferran, "and you can see that different people were doing different things during the qualifying session. We chose to run two sets of new tyres on the last qualifying session. I think it was the right thing - it gets the drivers in a good rhythm before their very last run."

With so many changes in qualifying, including knockout stages, refuelling, new tyres and more, the first qualifying session at Bahrain proved an eye opener.

"It was a really exciting qualifying session and there were a lot of unknowns in it," exclaimed Gil. "It was the first time we've run the session so we'll see how the strategy plays out tomorrow. We were taking nothing for granted; we tried to plan for every scenario we could but still, as you could see, there was a lot going on and we were having to make a lot of decisions on the fly. Certainly he threats of red and yellow flags, and the traffic, played a big part in the whole session."

So how does Gil de Ferran like the new system?

"I love it. I spent a whole hour without breathing."