Do you feel your title bid is back on track after your fourth place at Monza, or is that overstating the case? I never felt out of contention. There is a long way to go and, with this year's revised scoring system, people tend to exaggerate the significance of points gaps. We just have to keep achieving our optimum in the next five races, as we did in Italy, but what the other teams do is out of our hands.
How do you see the title fight evolving? That's hard to say. After Spa, people were saying Jenson Button and I had no chance in the championship and then boom, one race later we're right back in it. Fernando [Alonso] was written off two races ago, but he still seems to be a factor. People get a bit overexcited when they see a gap of 20, 30 or even 50 points and forget how quickly things can change. Who knows what will happen next?
What was going through your mind when your brakes bound on and teammate Mark Webber passed you last Sunday? I was pretty unhappy, to put it politely. The problem cost me about four seconds and I lost contact with the group of cars ahead. The race would have been more comfortable if it hadn't happened. You salvaged fourth by staying out for 52 of the 53 laps on the same set of soft tyres, How much of a risk was that?
We haven't taken any stupid risks this year, but we're prepared to take a gamble if we can make something work - and we did. Did you ever imagine that a 52-lap stint might be possible? No! Everyone stayed out longer than anticipated on the soft tyres - I think we only did about eight-lap runs when we tried them on Friday, but track conditions improved significantly during the weekend.
When did the idea of a long first stint first occur? I was asking the team about it quite early in the race, because I wasn't quick enough on the straights to pass anybody and needed to use strategy. At that stage we weren't thinking about staying out until the penultimate lap, though. It just turned out to be the best thing to do. How did the car feel after 50 laps? The tyres were pretty done and I was sliding around quite a lot. When I put the new set on, it took a couple of corners to get them up to temperature and then suddenly I had grip again. There was so much rubber on the tread that it felt as though I was floating.