Q&A with Vijay Mallya before Hockenheim

After a challenging local race at Silverstone, Dr Vijay Mallya sums up the mood in the team and looks forward to a competitive showing in Hockenheim.

How would you sum up the British Grand Prix weekend?

It was certainly frustrating that we didn’t score points at Silverstone. We were really hoping to put on a good performance and were targeting a double points finish. The weather definitely played its part on Friday and Saturday, so we really couldn’t predict accurately what to expect for Sunday. One car was set up for the wet and the other for the dry.

How disappointing was it to see Paul retire so early from his home race?

The conditions would have suited Paul, who had the dry set-up. Unfortunately he made contact with Grosjean and that was the end of his right rear tyre. You have to expect things like this in F1, but it’s always disappointing when it happens to you.

Nico nearly made the points – it must have been very frustrating to see him fall back right at the end…

Nico did very well, although I wish he could have hung on to ninth. The bottom line is we followed a hard-hard-soft strategy. In the last stint we asked the soft tyres to last 17 laps and Nico was under pressure to defend his position. It was a combination of tyre degradation and Nico making a slight error when he locked up the rears. I guess Alonso lost his lead to Webber because he followed the same strategy and clearly the hard tyres were better at the end of the race. Anyway, there was a lot to learn and once again the unpredictability of the tyres played a very important role. We will come back in Germany with a greater sense of determination.

You must take encouragement from seeing both car running strongly in the top ten once again?

It’s satisfying to see that we are consistent top ten performers. We need that little bit of extra luck to get on the podium. Having said that, our immediate competitors didn’t have too much luck either – Perez and Maldonado were both going well, but they didn’t score. Sauber didn’t get any more points to increase their lead over us. We are still only three points adrift of Williams and 16 behind Sauber, so we have reasons to be optimistic going forward.

F1 has not raced at Hockenheim since 2010, so there’s no Pirelli knowledge and perhaps a bit more uncertainty…

Yes, it’s wide open in that sense. It’s also Nico’s home race. We have no time to take things easy. We have to take every race very seriously, with the same intensity and do everything we possibly can to earn more points.