On whether he changed his approach during the winter. Many people expected his teammate, Robert Kubica, to be faster than him this season. But he has returned looking more confident and faster this year than last:
No, I am as confident as last year. And I didn’t change my approach. I changed a bit last year, but not because of Robert, but because of the team. In smaller teams, I quite often had to put a lot of effort into trying to get things changed, to bring the development forward. And now I don’t need to do that so much. Things are just coming and we have more people and we have more money, so I can focus a bit more on what is more important for me, like the real driving, the setup of the car and the training, the workout.
On whether this year's car suits his style better than last year's model:
No, I don’t think so. I was happy with my performance as well last year.
On whether the start of the season was stronger than he expected:
Yes, very clearly. We saw in testing that we were strong. But I didn’t think we would be as good. Especially, Renault, I expected to be stronger. They were quite quick in the last couple of tests before the first race. And I thought they would be difficult to beat. The last two races we beat them. So it’s definitely better than I expected.
On Mario Theissen's statement before Malaysia that BMW was close to McLaren, and whether Nick thought after the race that it is possible for BMW to catch up to McLaren:
They have very clearly moved ahead. Probably more than Mario expected, but also more than I expected. Concerning Ferrari, I thought they would still easily make the 1-2, even with the race not panning out perfectly. I doubt that we will catch them here. Not here in Bahrain. Because we don’t have a lot of new [car] parts here. So I don’t think we will catch them here.
As to whether there is pressure now that BMW is 'overachieving' by being the third fastest team, and whether it would now become a goal to simply stay in that position for the rest of the season:
I would be happy if we stayed as the third strongest team. But that doesn’t mean that we sit back and say we wanted to be fourth, we are third, OK, that’s it. Still everybody is pushing very hard. And I’m sure that people in the team hope that we can close the gap to the front runners, to Ferrari and McLaren. That is our goal, so it doesn’t matter if we overachieve or not. It doesn’t change the way we keep pushing.
On achieving second position, and overtaking McLaren:
At the moment, I would doubt it very much. They are simply too strong. As I said we don’t have a lot of new parts here. So I would be happy again to be the third strongest team. But you never know. After Australia I said that Ferrari is easily the quickest team and then McLaren won the race. They had a 1-2. So we just have to wait.
On the changing handling characteristics of his racing car and how and why it suddenly works well in the races while having some problems during practice:
We are still trying to understand. I’m not sure. Of course there was more grip and more rubber on Sunday, maybe that is part of the reason. It was quite hot also. Already on Saturday in qualifying it wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t anywhere near what we would have liked. In the race I was quite happy with the car. And we still don’t understand what that is.
