By Phil Huff
April 23 2006

Rubens Barrichello finally made it into the Fastest Three on Saturday, meaning the Honda Racing F1 driver had to face the FIA press conference. Here's what the Brazilian had to say. Rubens, great to see you up here next to your old teammate Michael Schumacher.

It's nice, very nice and I want to thank the whole team. The team has done a great job and in testing they were able to improve the car to my liking and the braking seems to be a lot better so I want to thank the whole team, the mechanics, the engineers, everyone for their effort. They know that I'm pushing very hard. I don't want to be playing second fiddle. There were some problems for me adapting to the car. Obviously I'm a little bit happier. Imola is quite a good place for an improvement and I think most of it, after the problems that we had in Australia, we had to improve the car on race pace, so tomorrow is a good test and we're going into it with a lot more optimism, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Are you surprised to be up here?

Not really. Obviously it looks like chaos from the outside with the car, but it's been hard to drive going to circuits with a new team and a new car. Still, our pace has been good. In Australia I should have been in the top ten but I got traffic on my quick lap and was knocked out. With these new rules, that can happen to the top guys as well. But like I said, I've been working very hard with the team. The team has been listening to my requests and this is the proof of it, that's why I want to thank them so much, because they put a lot of effort last week into improving the car. Jock [Clear] has been quite good engineering and putting the car right for me. It's still not 100% but I'm enjoying it much more. Imola is not actually a place where I go that well and so I'm quite happy.

But how marginal is race strategy here?

We're only going to learn that tomorrow, but the most important thing is that we have to rely on ourselves. We understood a lot of the problems that we had in the races, since the beginning, not just in Melbourne. We made the car faster, there's no doubt that the car is faster on race pace. Ferrari, with Michael, seems to be on another level in a way, but we're here to win the race and we're going to give it everything and see if our work from last week paid off and I think it will.

With Alonso having such a bad position in the order, do you think the World Championship is still open for Honda and you in particular?

No, listen, I was much more optimistic when I went to the first race and obviously what happened put us down a little bit, even though Jenson has being doing a superb job to be qualifying up there. In the first two races, he showed the pace of the car and he was on the podium once. We're going to have to work really hard to get the car to where we want. It is a good car, there's no doubt of that. We need to improve small areas to make it a real contender for race wins but the championship is still too open. You can see that from Ferrari's pace. It's a kind of a McLaren situation from last year; they start late… they start here in Imola actually, where they were faster than the Renaults. If that's a bluff, just because of the track, we don't know, but the championship will be very open until very late, I guess.