CART Media Conference

Topics:  CART

Gil de Ferran
February 26, 2001

T.E. McHALE: We are now pleased to welcome the 2000 FedEx Championship Series champion Gil de Ferran of Marlboro Team Penske. Thanks for joining us today.

GIL de FERRAN: Good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to be out of the cage and talking again.

GIL de FERRAN: Well, I mean, if I was going to describe my season, I would call it brief. I really didn't do a lot of running at all. Obviously, since the last accident in Homestead transpired, my injuries were worse than they first appeared, so I haven't been running at all. You know, I did not spend as much time as I would have liked driving the car. But, you know, hopefully that's not going to be too much of a setback since, you know, there's very little change in the equipment for this year. Basically the car is a minor development on the car that we used last year, you know. The tires are no much different. The engine, you know, obviously there's a new spec with the lower boost thing. Helio has been working on getting that working properly with Honda. You know, there's not that much to - how can I say - to develop or do. I'm hoping that that's going to not -- that that's not going to set me back too much in the beginning of the season. It's not an ideal situation, but it's a reality that I've got to deal with.

GIL de FERRAN: I guess after the Homestead accident, I was in so much pain in my foot, that was the worst pain I had. My foot is still not a hundred percent. I cannot run or do any high-impact training on my foot. But that wasn't really what was holding me back and my driving, you know. My shoulder and my -- my left shoulder and my rib cage on the left started hurting as soon as I got back in the car. You know, that was putting me back quite a bit in the car. That's why we decided to call it off. I've been basically doing physio for about ten days now.

GIL de FERRAN: That's what I'm hoping for. I'm starting to step up my training program, you know. I can't even remember when the date was of the Laguna test, but I think it was about 12 days ago or something like that, you know, on the five or six day after that, I couldn't do much. I had to do very slow physiotherapy, and I can't run, as well, which is unfortunate, which is what I like to do a lot to stay in good shape. But this last week I started to accelerate the intensity of my training program, you know, as my injuries are getting better. I'm hoping to be in good shape there when I get to Mexico. That's for sure.

GIL de FERRAN: I think it's going to be a great disappointment not to be able to race over there. From a personal standpoint, it was a very, very important race. You know, I thoroughly enjoyed, you know, racing at home. I was very, very happy to go there in the first time I think it was in '96, it was the first race. You know, from an emotional standpoint, was a very important race. So I'm very, very disappointed that the race was canceled. However, you know, those sort of races, you can't go against the wind, you know? I mean, a race is supposed to be something that everybody wants for it to happen, all the sponsors involved, including the government of Rio and the people of Rio. You know, is supposed to be a big party, supposed to be an event that everybody enjoys. If you have any sort of disputes or bad feelings or anything like that going on, it's really not ideal. You know, I suppose whenever I was starting to see that things were not going so well there, it was like, "Okay, well, you know, it's clear that somebody does not want the race to happen." So from that standpoint, I think it was probably the right decision.

GIL de FERRAN: I do envision it returning to Brazil. The only way I see it happening, like I said, if it's in a situation where everybody wants the race to happen, you know, including the city that hosts it. I don't really understand exactly what went on, what went wrong in Rio. You know, to me, you know, I know a lot has been said, a lot has been written about it. To me, the situation is far too complicated. I did not make myself -- I did not, you know, see it as my job to make myself acquainted with all the details. So I just have to say, you know, I hope we can race again in Brazil. There is a lot of Brazilian drivers, there is a lot of interest there on the Brazilian fans, and there is a lot of Brazilian investment in the series. I think on those three counts, you know, when you weigh everything up, it does warrant having a race over there.

GIL de FERRAN: There's certainly a lot of fire there, I can tell you that. Everybody's really fired up, you know, including Roger. I think the mindset is not really trying, "What we going to do for an encore?" I think everybody on the team realizes it was really difficult to win one championship and to have as good a season as we had last year. It's going to be just as difficult to win a second one. Obviously, we fancy our chances with -- I certainly think we have a chance in this championship again, but I don't think it's going to be easy at all. I'm sure Helio is in the same mindset.

GIL de FERRAN: We have a busy season ahead of us. Before those decisions were made, a lot of analysis went on, "Could we do this well? Could we not do this well?" I think the team really worked hard to put an infrastructure together that -- so we'll be able to take care of everything properly. You know, I think one of the things that open it up was the testing rules for the season. You know, last year we were testing a lot in between races. This year we're not allowed to do that. Even though they added more races to it, I would probably say it's less busy than it was last year.

GIL de FERRAN: Put it this way: After working with Roger for a year, I don't feel I ever had the right again of feeling tired (laughter). You know, "man on a mission" is and an understatement. He works unbelievable hours. He works more than everybody else. He wakes up earlier and goes to bed later than anybody else. He's got so much energy and he's totally devoted to whatever he puts himself towards. I mean, racing is very important I think for him. I'm sure if you ask him that, he'll be able to expand on that. "A man on a mission" is an understatement when you're talking about Roger, I think (laughter).

GIL de FERRAN: Absolutely. It's just a shame that the very old track in Interlagos is not in good shape anymore. That in my mind was probably one of the best road courses ever conceived. If you can't have one thing, we'll have the other. The new one is not that bad. I mean, safety-wise it's very, very good. They had to bring the standards up to accommodate the Formula 1 cars. If it's good enough for them, it's probably will be good enough for us, too.

GIL de FERRAN: Yeah, absolutely eases up on the schedule a little bit. You know, it's good in a way, but bad in another way. You know, once you start racing, you want to keep working. You know, you don't want to have big breaks like that, especially in the beginning of the season. I mean, if that month break came in July, that would be very welcome. But earlier on in the season, to be quite honest with you, I rather be running.

GIL de FERRAN: They're quite different. You know, I drove them in two configurations. I drove them at the speedway and PIR oval. At the speedway they got the super speedway configuration, which is similar -- it feels similar to ours. You know, the car has quite a bit less power, but grip-wise they feel fairly similar. On the mile oval configuration, the car has a lot more down force than what we have. You know, they put big wings on the car. The car goes around corners very, very fast. So they feel very, very different in the mile oval configuration. The car has very little power, but then again it goes through the corners very, very quickly. Our car, you know, you go very, very fast down the stretch because you have a lot of horsepower, and even sometimes you even get wheel spin coming off the slow turns on the short ovals. But you got to really brake a lot and slow down for the turn. The mile oval is a completely different animal.

GIL de FERRAN: Well, if I'm not mistaken, we had 20 days of testing, and it was going to be ten days each. I think we'll just about be able to use all those days over there. The problem is during the winter, there's not that many tracks that you can use. Those tracks also have limited dates available. Sometimes, you know, when you have something go wrong like an accident or something like that, you've got to spend some time rebuilding stuff or rescheduling everything. It's difficult to do all the testing you think you need to do.

GIL de FERRAN: It doesn't feel very different at all. I mean, I think I said earlier, is a mild development over last year's car. Obviously, we're hoping that even though it's a small development, we're hoping to get quite a bit of performance out of it, but it doesn't feel that different, you know. Most of the mechanical systems are the same. Basically the biggest development has been on the aerodynamics so the car doesn't have that much of a different feel.

GIL de FERRAN: I think, you know, as I look back, we had a very good season, particularly in terms of speed. I mean, we had -- if you look at our qualifying average, you can see it was -- it was either first or second to Montoya. But it was very, very good. Our racing average was not quite as good as the qualifying average that we had. It's basically trying to keep one in line with the other. I think last year was a little bit of an atypical season for a lot of people from that standpoint. You know, that would be the aim, probably get to the end of more races and trying to turn good qualifying performances into better race results.

GIL de FERRAN: Thank you very much.