Straight From Canada

Hi everyone!

It’s very good to be able to score, especially when everyone knows that this track is not the best one for the Honda car. But, it is surely my favorite one!

The weather was cold on Friday, so all the tests were in vain because of the Saturday and Sunday heat.

On Saturday morning, although we knew that this might have harmed our pace in the race, we took away a lot of the back wing to try to be competitive. We were able to go faster, but we were still the last ones in the classifying and we were 3 km slower than the other cars.

On Saturday morning the track started to melt. The combination of heat and the high speed of the cars made the classifying very difficult for everyone. I’m sure that this factor helped us. In normal conditions, the car would have come in 12th or 13th , in my opinion.

What I didn’t expect was the fever and the sore throat I got after the classifying. The funny thing is that throughout all the 259 races I have been in, I had never been through something like this. I had already gotten sick, but having such a high fever on a race weekend was new to me. Sunday, after having taken a lot of medicine, I woke up feeling better, but I was still a little weak, so I had to drink a lot of water.

The race started out really well and I was able to overtake 2 cars right at the start.

I had a very heavy car and I didn’t really make an effort to hold
Kovalainen and Heidfeld back because what mattered at that time was keeping a lot of distance between me and the cars that were behind mine.

I knew I wasn’t going to compete against a Mclaren or a BMW, but after the safety car and the usual stops I became the leader.
What great joy! All last year without scoring was paid off at that moment. When I stopped at the boxes and came back to the track with soft tires, the car was not the same.

My brakes were greatly worn out and because of the full tank the car’s response was very bad.

That’s why I had to leave the track. It was a pity because I was sure I could have held the Toyotas back.

There are two ways to rate the weekend. On one hand, going form 4th to 7th and losing points was terrible, but on the other hand, scoring points on a track that gave us no chances was very good.
I prefer thinking that the weekend overall was good!

Take care,

Rubens Barrichello