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They want to be the best, biggest band in the world. Ridiculous, right? But then the last people to talk like that were U2.

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May 22, 2005
Can You Catch Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?
By LISA BELKIN

To suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, many patients say, is to ”know you are crazy.” Other forms of psychosis may envelop the sufferers until they inhabit the delusion. Part of the torture of O.C.D. is, as patients describe it, watching as if from the outside as they act out their obsessions — knowing that they are being irrational, but not being able to stop. They describe thoughts crowding their minds, nattering at them incessantly — anxious thoughts, sexual thoughts, violent thoughts, sometimes all at the same time. Is the front door locked? Are there germs on my hands? Am I a murderer if I step on an ant? And they describe increasingly elaborate rituals to assuage those thoughts — checking and rechecking door locks, washing and rewashing hands, walking carefully, slowly and in bizarre patterns to avoid stepping on anything. They feel driven to do things they know make no sense.

There are researchers who believe that some of this disturbing cacophony — specifically a subset found only in children — is caused by something familiar and common. They call it Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated With Streptococcal Infection, or, because every disease needs an acronym, Pandas. And they are certain it is brought on by strep throat — or more specifically, by the antibodies created to fight strep throat.

If they are right, it is a compelling breakthrough, a map of the link between bacteria and at least one subcategory of mental illness. And if bacteria can cause O.C.D., then an antibiotic might mitigate or prevent it — a Promised Land of a concept to parents who have watched their children change overnight from exuberant, confident and familiar to doubt-ridden, fear-laden strangers.

Child psychiatrists have long known that sometimes O.C.D. in children can be like that, that it can come on fast, out of the blue, like a plague, and then last anywhere from days to months. If the typical graph of O.C.D. symptoms is a sine curve — with episodes that ramp up slowly, peak gradually, then abate just as slowly — the graph of rapid-onset O.C.D. is saw-toothed — flat, then a sudden spike, followed by a relatively sharp drop, then flat again.

The patterns certainly look as if they could be two separate disorders, with similar symptoms but different causes. Across the country, many doctors are convinced of this and are putting young sudden-onset O.C.D. patients on long-term doses of antibiotics. ”If I were to place bets,” says Judith Rapoport, the child psychiatrist who first brought O.C.D. to public attention with her book ”The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing,” that bet would be on the side of those who believe in Pandas.

But as certain as some researchers are, there are others, just as smart, with just as many impressive publications and titles, who think the theory is wrong or, at best, that it is too early to tell. And this group is warning that the Pandas hypothesis is misguided, perhaps even dangerous. ”Equivocal, controversial, unproven,” Dr. Stanford Shulman, chief of infectious disease at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, says of the theory.

Pandas stands at a familiar, necessary and utterly frustrating moment in medicine — in the gap between what doctors think and what they know. Practically every byte of scientific knowledge passes through a moment like this, on its way to being accepted as fact or dismissed as falsehood.

It has always been so, but in recent years several things about the process have changed. Science now does its thinking in public, with each incremental advance readily available online. And those waiting for answers are less patient and more involved. They don’t ask their doctors; they bring their own suggestions. They don’t want to wait for the results of a two-year double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial before they act.

Which means that they often find themselves acting before all the facts are in. Can strep bacteria cause obsessive-compulsive disorder? Do these children need penicillin or Prozac? Will we look back on these questions years from now and think, How could we have believed? Or, rather, How could we have doubted?


The most vocal voice in support of Pandas is Susan E. Swedo, a pediatrician and researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. She was the first to identify the syndrome, and the one who gave it a name. She has been studying the relationship between strep and O.C.D. for her entire career.

She began her work in the 80′s, a time of discovery in the world of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although the disease had long been known, it was not until 20 years ago that researchers began to understand how prevalent it was and not until a decade later that they came to see how often it occurred in children.

In 1989, Rapoport published her best-selling book, taking the illness into the mainstream spotlight. When the television program ”20/20” ran a segment about her book, it prompted 250,000 calls from worried parents who thought they recognized their children. And a good number of them, Rapoport says, were right. She estimates that more than one million children in the United States suffer from O.C.D. In fact, she argues, the disorder is one that often begins in childhood, which is why doctors should start looking for it then. Half of all adult O.C.D. patients look back and remember having repetitive thoughts and rituals when they were young, which is significantly higher than the percentage of adults with other psychiatric disorders who do.

Rapoport strongly suspected that there was a medical model for at least some percentage of O.C.D. sufferers — that the symptoms were not a result of emotional trauma (Freud’s belief that it is caused by overly strict toilet training had long since fallen out of favor) but rather were caused by a biological trigger. She and her research fellows at the N.I.M.H. spent several years looking into it. Swedo was one of those fellows.

Research had already shown that O.C.D. symptoms appear when there is damage to the basal ganglia, which is a cluster of neurons in the brain that acts as a gatekeeper for movement, thought and emotion. ”So we set out to find every known condition that involved abnormalities of the basal ganglia,” Swedo remembers.

Huntington’s disease was one. Parkinson’s was another. Also on the list was Sydenham’s chorea — a movement disorder known to medicine since before the Middle Ages, when it was called Saint Vitus’ dance. About 70 percent of patients who develop Sydenham’s also develop O.C.D. Sydenham’s is caused by rheumatic fever; rheumatic fever is in turn caused by Group A beta-hemolytic streptococcal bacteria. In other words, strep throat.

The biological cascade from strep to Sydenham’s starts when the body, thinking it is fighting the infection, begins to fight itself in a process known as molecular mimicry. The protein sheath that coats each invading bacterium cell is remarkably similar to the one that coats the native cells that form a particular part of the body. In this case, the protein code on the strep bacteria is a close match with the code on the cells in the basal ganglia. So the antibodies mistake the basal ganglia for strep and attack. This, of course, will not happen to every child who has strep throat, or even to most children, in the same way that every child who gets strep does not get rheumatic fever. ”It’s the wrong germ in the wrong child at the wrong time,” says Swedo, who suspects that some children are genetically predisposed toward Pandas.

By the mid-90′s, Swedo had graduated to her own research laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health. Back then the status of her research looked like this: O.C.D., she knew, could be caused by damage to the basal ganglia. Sydenham’s, too, was a result of such damage. Strep, by all accounts, was the cause of the damage in Sydenham’s patients. Sydenham’s patients often developed O.C.D. Given all that, the next logical question seemed obvious: Can strep cause O.C.D.?

Swedo turned her attention anew to that subgroup of patients who developed their symptoms seemingly overnight. She and her collaborators hypothesized that this difference in onset could be the key to something important, a separate category, a differentiating wrinkle in a familiar pattern. It might not be the key to decoding the cause of all O.C.D., but it might explain some percentage of cases.

Swedo and her researchers put out a request among those who treat and suffer from O.C.D., looking for subjects — children whose symptoms had come on suddenly. They received hundreds of calls and then determined that 109 of those children could accurately be described as having had a rapid onset of symptoms. The stories the parents told, while different in their particulars, were remarkably similar at their core. The symptoms came on so quickly that most parents could tell you the exact date that their children’s personalities changed. All these children woke up one morning, in the words of one parent, ”full-blown somebody else.”

The exact nature of the obsessions and compulsions differed from child to child (a fact that makes all O.C.D. tricky to diagnose). Some could not stop washing their hands or insisting they needed to use the toilet or checking to make sure that doors were closed and locked. Some developed overwhelming separation anxiety or worried that they would harm someone or do something wrong.

Some had one cluster of these symptoms during their first episode and a different set of symptoms the next time around. Nearly half complained of joint pain, but not always of a sore throat. They were fidgety and moody and obstinate. They had ”bad thoughts,” some sexual, some violent, some frightening, that they could not get out of their heads.

The children were then tested for evidence that they had recently had strep — either via throat culture, which would find active infection, or by a blood test that measures antibodies remaining after the actual infection is gone, or, when the episode was too long ago for either test to be effective, researchers asked about a remembered history of strep. In a striking percentage of cases, the search for strep came up positive.


Disagreement is what propels all of science. Proof and disproof seems almost a requirement on the road to consensus. Copernicus’s theory that the planets revolve around the sun was not fully accepted until long after his death. Pythagoras and Aristotle each suggested that the world was round, but the idea was not widely accepted for many centuries. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was mocked and ostracized for suggesting that by simply washing their hands, doctors could prevent women from dying during childbirth. It would be another quarter-century before Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister confirmed that destroying germs stops the spread of disease. Much more recently, doctors were exuberant when brain surgery seemed to halt the progression of Parkinson’s disease and bone-marrow transplants seemed to beat back breast cancer. But the excitement dimmed as further study found the initial data to be overly optimistic. Perhaps most significant to the discussion of Pandas, strep has been proposed as the cause of a number of conditions over the years, including Kawaski disease, but subsequent studies have repudiated the theories.

”The history of medicine is full of these examples,” says Dr. Barron Lerner, a medical historian at Columbia University Medical Center, describing fact later shown to be quackery, flights of fancy that turn out to be fact and many ideas that bounce for decades in the shades of gray between the two. ”What looks like it’s there sometimes turns out not to be there,” Lerner says, ”and what everybody is sure of sometimes turns out not to be certain.”

Swedo and her collaborators published several small preliminary studies during the late 90′s, and their first major paper claiming that Pandas was a separate syndrome appeared in 1998 in The American Journal of Psychiatry. Called ”Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated With Streptococcal Infections: Clinical Description of the First 50 Cases,” it is exactly that, a description of children who develop O.C.D. after exposure to Type A strep.

In a way, the description is a tautology — Pandas is classified as O.C.D. associated with strep, and therefore the only children who qualify for the diagnosis are those who have had recent strep. Swedo took the 109 rapid-onset cases and narrowed those to 50 that met her Pandas criteria, which means that 59 cases were triggered by something other than strep throat. She considers the results important, because at nearly 50 percent, the incidence of strep is far higher than would be expected in the general population and therefore statistically significant. But she agrees that her findings do not explain the cause of all O.C.D., or even all rapid-onset O.C.D.

Despite the details still up in the air, the existence of Pandas was compelling to many doctors. They saw it as inherently logical, and it gave a name to some otherwise mysterious cases that passed through their waiting rooms. ”There is no doubt in my mind,” says Tamar Chansky, a child psychologist specializing in childhood anxiety disorders and the author of ”Freeing Your Child From Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,” which devotes a long section to recognizing Pandas.

Not only is it real, says Chansky, who treats several patients who suffer from the disorder, but she has also noticed that each episode is often worse than the one before, creating the possibility that unless these children are treated prophylactically for strep, their O.C.D. episodes could be longer, more intense and more frequent.

”Yes, it is controversial, but I believe it is real,” agrees Dr. Azra Sehic, a pediatrician in Kingston, Pa. One of the first times Sehic encountered Pandas was when she saw it in one of her patients, Maury Cronauer. Just before Memorial Day in 2003, when she was 6, Maury became ill with strep throat. She was treated with antibiotics and one morning soon after started acting ”odd,” says her mother, Michelle, who is a nurse. A girl who never worried much about germs, Maury started washing her hands constantly, the most common symptom of O.C.D.

By the next day she was hysterical, saying horrid thoughts were in her head. She wasn’t sure she loved her parents. She thought she was going to cheat at school or steal something. She wanted the racing thoughts to go away, and at one point her parents found her curled in a ball in the laundry room, her eyes crammed shut and her hands over her ears.

Sehic mentioned to Maury’s parents that the strep might be the cause of her symptoms. She prescribed a longer course of antibiotics, to eliminate any lingering strep bacteria, which might signal the body to create more antibodies.

The O.C.D. went away. A year and a half later, Maury got strep throat again, and the O.C.D. symptoms returned. She is now taking prophylactic penicillin, an approach that is also controversial. ”It is not proven that it will help her, but it is likely that it will, so we are trying,” Sehic says.

As Pandas was becoming widely known, and as doctors began using antibiotics as a first salvo against obsession, there was ever more research under way. Swedo was a co-author of 30 journal articles between 1998 and 2005. Across the country other lab groups took up the subject as well, and there are dozens more publications in which Swedo played no role.

Some of these merely confirmed the existence of the subgroup Swedo had described. Other studies were designed to take knowledge of Pandas to the next level — from description to proof. What Swedo had done was identify a group in which two things were true: O.C.D. developed suddenly, and the children had evidence of recent strep. But that does not prove that the strep caused the O.C.D. Nearly all of science is a search for cause and effect — that A made B happen, that C made B stop.

The bane of all science is coincidence. For example, a notable percentage of children develop their first signs of autism soon after a vaccination, and it is tempting to blame the shot for the symptoms. But autism as a rule tends to show itself during the years when children are also scheduled to receive fairly regular immunizations. So the odds are good that the two events will be temporally linked.

Separating correlation from causation is where every research road becomes bumpy. ”It’s been more complicated to follow up on this than we ever thought it was going to be,” Rapoport says.

There have been studies with results that were remarkably clear-cut — the plasmapheresis trials, for instance. Plasmapheresis, also known as therapeutic plasma exchange, is essentially a cleansing of the blood, somewhat like dialysis. If strep antibodies were responsible for O.C.D. symptoms in Pandas patients, Swedo theorized, then clearing those antibodies from the bloodstream should prompt improvement.

Because the procedure is so invasive, the only subjects enrolled were those in the worst shape. Of the 29 children in the trial, 10 received plasma exchange, 9 received intravenous immunoglobulin and 10 received a placebo. According to the results published in the journal Lancet in 1999, the children receiving plasma exchange became markedly better, while those receiving placebo treatment did not.

Other studies had results that were somewhat murkier. One tested the theory that you could prevent Pandas by preventing strep. Simply treating strep does not prevent the onset of Pandas since the antibodies have already had a chance to form, which leaves prophylaxis as the most promising form of treatment. That is one way strep was first proved to cause rheumatic fever. When patients who had had rheumatic fever were given daily antibiotics, they did not get strep and they did not get a recurrence of rheumatic fever. Similarly, the hypothesis went, if strep causes Pandas, then preventing patients from getting strep would also prevent a recurrence of an episode of Pandas.

So Swedo conducted a prophylaxis study. Half of a group of Pandas patients was put on daily doses of prophylactic antibiotics, while the other half was given a placebo. After several months, the placebo and antibiotic groups were switched. If prophylaxis works, then patients should have developed more, and more intense, episodes of O.C.D. while they were taking the placebo than while taking the antibiotics.

But the antibiotic chosen for this particular study was a liquid, and unlike the case with pills, which can be counted, it was difficult for parents to keep track of whether a dose had been missed. Even one missed dose would leave a child vulnerable to strep, and some children in the antibiotic group did get sick. A percentage of those developed Pandas.

At the same time, when children in the placebo group became ill, their parents figured out that what they had been dispensing was sugar water and, fearing that the sore throat would lead to a return of Pandas, went and got a prescription for penicillin. Not nearly as many of the control group got strep or Pandas as had been predicted.

”A lot was learned about parental behavior,” Swedo says, ”but not a lot about Pandas.”


Roger Kurlan, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, is not a man who minces words. ”The only thing that’s a proven fact about Pandas,” he says, ”is that children with these symptoms have been observed.” Everything else, most specifically the role of strep in causing the symptoms, ”is nothing but speculation.”

Kurlan and his collaborator Edward L. Kaplan, an expert in strep at the University of Minnesota Medical School, have become Swedo’s most vocal critics. They describe strep and O.C.D. as two things that are ”true, true and unrelated.” Yes, it is true that some children develop rapid-onset O.C.D. And yes, it is true that a high percentage of those test positive for strep. But that does not mean that the former is caused by the latter.

”In the prior two weeks, 90 percent of these kids might also have eaten pizza,” Kurlan says. ”Can I make an association that pizza is linked to O.C.D.?”

”If 100 kids fall out of a tree and break their arms and we test them for strep, there’s going to be a very high percentage of children who have evidence of recent infection,” echoes Stanford Shulman of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. ”That doesn’t mean strep is the reason they fell out of the tree.”

A more likely explanation for the presence of strep in children with Pandas, these doctors say, is that any infection, in fact any type of stress, can cause spikes in O.C.D. behavior. And they cite as an example children with Tourette’s syndrome, who frequently have O.C.D. symptoms that ebb and flow with stress.

Children with neurological disorders ”are sensitive to any number of things,” Kurlan says. ”If their dog dies. If their parents are fighting. I’ve seen O.C.D. get worse with a cold, with hay fever, with pneumonia. If there is anything special about strep, I don’t think anyone has been able to find it.”

Yes, some children appear to develop symptoms more suddenly than others, he says, but that could be because they have hidden their earlier symptoms from their parents, which O.C.D. patients are known to do. And, yes, he agrees, patients often improve after a positive strep test and a regimen of antibiotics. But because O.C.D. is cyclical, odds are that they would have improved without the test and the medicine anyway. Add to that the fact that some children are strep carriers. They will test positive for the bacteria any time they happen to be cultured, further skewing the cause-and-effect relationship that Swedo is trying to prove.

Kurlan says that he understands why the idea of a bacterial cause for disturbing behavior is attractive to parents. A germ can be cured. A germ is not the parents’ fault. ”It’s a convenient link,” he says, ”but it’s very difficult to show a connection.”

Assigning blame where none exists can be dangerous, Kurlan says. Part of the harm is that of commission — giving unnecessary medication. Patients like Maury Cronauer, he says, who take penicillin every day to prevent strep in the first place, are making themselves vulnerable to drug allergies and are promoting antibiotic resistance. And he disagrees with Swedo’s view that plasmapheresis can be the answer for the most severely affected patients. The procedure leaves children vulnerable to serious infection, he says, which he considers too high a risk given that the symptoms will arguably run their course over time.

A more insidious form of harm, however, is that of omission. While turning to antibiotics to cure their child’s Pandas, parents might be ignoring other treatments that could alleviate what skeptics believe the child actually has — plain old O.C.D. It may come on slowly or gradually, in the presence of strep or not; whatever the details, a child who cannot stop washing her hands needs to be treated with one of the many drugs and behavioral-therapy regimens that are successful in battling O.C.D., he says.

”If families are distracted by a simple answer and are therefore not tackling the more serious issues, that would be a disservice,” Kurlan says. ”Worse, that would be bad medicine.”

ndividuals are not statistics, and their stories are not proof. But as I met families and heard their tales, I came to more deeply understand why Swedo is so certain of her theory and Kurlan is so wary of it.

One 10-year-old girl in New Jersey, for instance, illustrates the hazy, sometimes illusory, difference between Pandas and O.C.D. The girl’s mother (who asked that her name not be used to protect her daughter’s privacy) describes two distinct times, at age 4 and age 8, when her bubbly child became riddled with disturbing thoughts: ”My mouth is full of cavities” or ”The waiter put poison in my soda.”

The first time, the mother says, her daughter’s doctors were uncertain of the cause. But the mother, after doing her own research and suspecting that it might be Pandas, called the N.I.M.H. Someone there confirmed her suspicions. Soon after, the girl took antibiotics, and, her mother says, the symptoms went away in seven months. The second time it took almost a year. The girl has had behavioral therapy but is not taking any medication for O.C.D. because her mother does not think it is necessary. The one precaution the family takes is keeping a supply of rapid strep test kits in the house and using them regularly.

Learning that her daughter had Pandas saved her own sanity, the woman says. ”It was like drowning in the middle of the ocean, and you grab onto something that will help you float.”

And yet. The second of the girl’s two episodes, the mother says, was not brought on by strep but by a virus. By Swedo’s definition, this would mean that the child did not have Pandas; that her parents think otherwise, Kurlan would argue, shows the danger of a bacterial scapegoat. The mother says that whatever caused the outbreaks — strep infection, viral infection — all that matters is that, at the moment, her daughter is fine. But when I ask the girl when she last had her bad thoughts, she tells me, ”Last week.”

Another story of another child, however, shows the damage that can be done if parents start with a psychological rather than a physical assumption. (These parents also didn’t want their names used to protect their daughter’s privacy.) This little girl was 6 last May, when according to her parents, she changed overnight, becoming clingy and asking the same question over and over and over and over again.

Her mother was pregnant at the time, and a psychiatrist her parents knew suggested that their daughter feared the arrival of her new sibling and was looking for attention. So first her parents reassured her. Then they began to punish her, sending her to her room so she could ”think about her behavior and change it,” her mother says.

No one in the family, not even the girl’s father, himself a doctor, linked any of this behavior to the raging strep infection she had three weeks earlier. They kept punishing her, and she kept insisting that she didn’t want to act this way. ”Please stop punishing me for something I can’t help,” the mother recalls her daughter begging.

The parents took her back to the pediatrician’s office (they had already been there three times), where they were given a prescription for an antidepressant. Instead of having it filled, they took her to a pediatric psychiatrist, who asked, ”Has she been sick with a sore throat?” Blood tests showed that her level of strep antibodies was twice as high as it should have been. Two months later, after several weeks of antibiotics and several sessions with Tamar Chansky for cognitive behavioral therapy, the little girl was acting like her old self again.


From where Roger Kurlan and other doubters sit, the situation looks simple. The theory of Pandas, they say, has not been proved. Until the causal link to strep is made, these children simply have O.C.D., and anyone who thinks differently is fooling himself. From where Swedo and her supporters sit, things look equally simple. They agree that cause and effect has not yet been definitively proved. But they are adamant that what has been proved so far is too significant to be ignored and that further research is more than warranted.

In the interim, they argue, logic dictates that any child who develops full-blown O.C.D. seemingly overnight should be given a throat culture or a strep-antibody test before she is sent to a psychiatrist. ”I’m all for empirical stringency,” Chansky says, ”but in the meantime, there’s something so basic that can be done. We’re talking about a throat culture and maybe a blood test. What is the downside?”

The downside, Kurlan says, is that science is not supposed to guess. ”We would be testing children as if the results had meaning for their treatment,” he says, ”and there is insufficient evidence that it does.”

Swedo is still looking for that evidence. Her most recent publication, in the April 2005 issue of Biological Psychiatry, describes a new study of prophylactic antibiotics, one in which administration of the medication was more closely controlled. The results: Those who received the antibiotics saw ”significant decreases” in strep infections and in ”neuropsychiatric exacerbations” over the course of a year.

Kurlan, in turn, is conducting research of his own, a nationwide study of 80 patients — half with a history of O.C.D. that meets the Pandas criteria and half with O.C.D. that does not. For two years, researchers have been logging the rates of strep and the episodes of O.C.D. in each group. If strep causes Pandas, then O.C.D. symptoms should be intensified in the Pandas group relative to their exposure to strep, while in the control group a variety of system-stressing triggers should cause a spike in symptoms.

When the data are compiled and made public later this year, the findings may prove that Swedo is wrong. Or they may instead prove that she is right. Most likely, this latest research will simply lead to more research, as science accumulates its evidence one bit of data at a time.


Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was about Thomas Ellenson, a special-needs child in a mainstream school.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Outrage and Silence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.

That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month – most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders – this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims – have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.

The Muslim world’s silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq – as well as the only workable strategy going forward.

The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift the U.S. and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound – in both religious and political terms.

Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite’s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor’s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization.

At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That’s why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as “resistance” to occupation.

Salama Na’mat, the Washington bureau chief for the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat, wrote the other day: “What is the responsibility of the [Arab] regimes and the official and semiofficial media in the countries bordering Iraq in legitimizing the operations that murder Iraqis? … Isn’t their goal to thwart [the emergence of] the newborn democracy in Iraq so that it won’t spread in the region?” (Translation by Memri.)

In identifying the problem, though, Mr. Na’mat also identifies the solution. If you want to stop a wave of suicide bombings, the likes of which we are seeing in Iraq, it takes a village. I am a big believer that the greatest restraint on human behavior is not laws and police, but culture and religious authority. It is what the community, what the village, deems shameful. That is what restrains people. So how do we get the Sunni Arab village to delegitimize suicide bombers?

Inside Iraq, obviously, credible Sunnis have to be brought into the political process and constitution-drafting, as long as they do not have blood on their hands from Saddam’s days. And outside Iraq, the Bush team needs to be forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their media, government and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq.

If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis were given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. Iraqi Sunnis would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they need to succeed.

That is the only way it stops, because we don’t know who is who. It takes the village – and right now the Sunni Arab village needs to be pressured and induced to restrain those among them who are engaging in these suicidal murders of innocents.

The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and compassion that it propagates.

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Betty Alexandra Bastidas for The New York Times

William Bryan Purcell offered nail painting in his all-pink tent at “The Muster,” a public art event held at Governors Island on Saturday.

May 16, 2005
Desert Island Fantasy With a Tent and a Cause
By RANDY KENNEDY
It sounds like the ultimate urban childhood fantasy, hatched while staring out a window at a brick wall: take over a deserted island for a day, camp out in a grassy field, make crazy tents and dress up in crazy costumes, and then invite people to get on a boat and come see the results.

On Saturday, with the help of the Public Art Fund, the artist Allison Smith and more than 100 other artists achieved this fantasy, within the shadows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, commandeering Governors Island to create a kind of conceptual art version of day camp. Or maybe a Dadaist’s dream of a craft fair. Or else a mini-Woodstock in which music was replaced by artists taking the stage in mock-military style to declare that they were fighting for causes like “sequined religious figures,” “the right to sing sentimental songs in full,” “the right to be scared” or more straightforward causes like financial support for AIDS research and ending overfishing of the oceans.

The setting for the event – which Ms. Smith called “The Muster,” using the theme of Civil War re-enactment as a loose aesthetic organizing principle – was almost as surreal as the encampment of artists itself. Nearly deserted since the Coast Guard closed its base there in 1996, Governors Island feels ghostly, even on a sunny weekend day – its hotel, beauty salon, bowling alley, movie theater, nine-hole golf course, Burger King restaurant and Georgian-style mansions all sitting empty, awaiting a decision by state and city officials about what the 172-acre island will become.

Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund, said he and Ms. Smith, who had created a smaller version of “The Muster” last year on a farm in Pennsylvania, saw the island as the perfect place for the event, both practically and metaphorically. “This is almost like a free zone right now,” Mr. Eccles said. “It doesn’t really come under the kind of constraints you have in other parts of the city. It would be very difficult to do this kind of project in, say, Central Park or even Prospect Park.”

At times on Saturday, the gathering had the feel of any normal, impromptu cookout in a park. Shaggy teenagers played Hacky Sack. Little girls had ribbons braided in their hair. Fried chicken and pasta salad were served on tables with red-checkered tablecloths. But in line to be served there was a woman with oversized female genitalia sewn onto her leotard. And out in the field, there were tents like the all-pink one by William Bryan Purcell, who said his cause was “the just representation of female intentions.”

“I’m offering nail painting, hair brushing, intimate conversation, makeovers – basically anything you need to get yourself fixed up,” said Mr. Purcell, an artist, who was also smoking a large cigar. (“I didn’t want to come across as too pink,” he explained.)

Ms. Smith said that by the end of the day, about 1,500 people had made the trip by ferry. One of them, Michele Siegel, who wandered by Mr. Purcell’s tent with a friend, Margie Weinstein, said the whole event felt like “Burning Man for lazy people,” referring to the annual counterculture event staged in Nevada, in one of the country’s most remote places. (Governors Island is only 800 yards from the tip of Manhattan.)

Civil War re-enactment was the guiding idea in large part because Ms. Smith grew up in Manassas, Va., and has always been fascinated by the obsessive dedication to authenticity of Civil War re-enactors. But many of the 40 or so tents, shacks and teepees scattered across a field near an old fort where the event took place ignored the theme altogether. One looked like a ship, and out front sat a man in a striped prison uniform playing a guitar and singing the blues song “Caldonia.” In another, a large trampoline served as the floor, and a third looked like a Day-Glo maypole.

Others did toy with the military idea, mostly in a nonpolitical way. Gary Graham, a fashion designer, made ghostly military uniforms and enlisted his friends Charles Beyer and Brianna Espitalier to dress in them with gory makeup. A woman sat inside the tent with votive candles, reading “On Being Ill” by Virginia Woolf. While some of the tents and costumes seemed like leftovers from a school play, Mr. Graham’s were serious.

“Hair and makeup people came over on the first ferry this morning at 7:30 – we had a bugle call to get up,” said Mr. Beyer, who, like many of the artists, slept in their tents on Friday night.

Across the way, students from the Rhode Island School of Design, under the direction of Liz Collins, a professor, put up a tent filled with knitting machines, where they cranked out a huge abstract red-white-and-blue cotton banner during the afternoon. Julia Bryan-Wilson, another professor, said that earlier in the day, the knitters were approached by a man who had come to the island thinking there was going to be a real Civil War re-enactment. “He was just really confused,” she said. “When I said that we were fighting for a sovereign nation of knitters, he didn’t like that at all.”

If he did not like that, then he probably hated the tent run by the artists Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner. It included a bench where passersby were summoned to kneel, confess their sins through a megaphone and be whipped with a leather belt. “We’re the negative energy vortex here,” Ms. Eisenman said. “We give a home to everyone’s yang. It has to go someplace, so it comes here.”

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Hector Mata/AFP – Getty Images

Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa defeated Mayor James Hahn to become the city’s
first Hispanic mayor in more than a century.

L.A. Elects Hispanic Mayor for First Time in Over 100 Years
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, May 18 – Antonio Villaraigosa, who won the mayor’s office in a thorough trouncing of the incumbent, James K. Hahn, said today that he intended to be the mayor of all of Los Angeles, not just the nearly 50 percent of Latino heritage. But his victory confirmed the rising political power of Latinos in the nation’s second-largest city.

After a lackluster term tainted by accusations of corruption at City Hall, Mr. Hahn was turned out of office in favor of a high school dropout who went on to become speaker of the California Assembly and a member of the Los Angeles City Council.

With virtually all of the votes counted, Mr. Villaraigosa had 260,721 votes, or 58.6 percent, to 183,749 votes, or 41.3 percent, for Mr. Hahn, according to the city clerk’s office. Mr. Villaraigosa swept nearly every ethnic group in this diverse city and won in almost every neighborhood, except Mr. Hahn’s home area of San Pedro, near the port, and the conservative northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley.

The mayor-elect was joined this morning by two prominent African-American leaders, Bernard C. Parks, a councilman and former chief of police, and John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. All three spoke of the significance of Mr. Villaraigosa’s strong majorities among the city’s black and Latino populations.

“I’m an American of Mexican descent and I’m proud of that,” Mr. Villaraigosa, 52, said at an auto repair training center sponsored by the Urban League. “But I intend to be mayor of all of Los Angeles. As the mayor of the most diverse city in the world, that’s the only way it can work.”

He said he had no national ambitions, even though as mayor of Los Angeles he now becomes one of the most visible Latino leaders in the country. He will take the oath of office on July 1.

At a victory celebration on Tuesday night, supporters chanted “Si, se puede!” – Spanish for “Yes, we can!” – as Mr. Villaraigosa strode to the podium. He thanked his family and the people who had inspired him over the years, and promised to “bring this great city together.”

“You all know I love L.A., but tonight I really love L.A.,” an exuberant Mr. Villaraigosa told his supporters.

The two candidates were a study in contrasts. Mr. Hahn, the son of one of the region’s most popular politicians, Kenneth J. Hahn, who served 40 years as a county supervisor, was buttoned-down to the point of drabness. He acknowledged a case of “charisma deficit disorder,” but said he was interested in getting things done, not touting his accomplishments.

Mr. Villaraigosa, who is as outgoing as Mr. Hahn is shy, was raised on the Latino east side by a single immigrant mother. He dropped out of high school for a time, then worked his way through the University of California, Los Angeles, and became a union organizer, then speaker of the State Assembly. He has been a member of the Los Angeles City Council since 2003.

The contest was a rematch of the 2001 mayoral race, which Mr. Hahn won by seven points after trailing Mr. Villaraigosa for much of the campaign. That race featured a number of late attacks by Mr. Hahn, who repeatedly attacked Mr. Villaraigosa for a letter he had written seeking clemency for a convicted cocaine trafficker.

Mr. Hahn’s campaign was similarly negative this time, even using the same slogan, “Los Angeles can’t trust Antonio Villaraigosa.” Mr. Hahn accused his opponent, a former president of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, of being soft on crime. He also noted that Mr. Villaraigosa had accepted thousands of dollars in campaign donations from out-of-state businessmen bidding on city contracts.

Mr. Villaraigosa, who outpolled Mr. Hahn in the primary election by 33 percent to 24 percent, generally ran an upbeat, front-runner’s campaign. Although some of his advertisements noted the federal investigation of possible corruption in city contracting under Mayor Hahn, Mr. Villaraigosa mainly stressed what he called his ability to bring Los Angeles’s varied geographic, ethnic and racial communities together.

In this he was aided by Mr. Hahn’s two most significant actions as mayor. In 2002, Mr. Hahn engineered the ouster of the Los Angeles Police Chief, Bernard Parks, an African-American, which alienated many black voters who had supported Mr. Hahn in 2001. Mr. Hahn also campaigned vigorously to defeat an effort by residents of the San Fernando Valley to secede from the city of Los Angeles, angering a part of the city that had provided a major share of his margin of victory over Mr. Villaraigosa four years ago. Mr. Villaraigosa will be the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since 1872, but he won the office on more than the votes of the city’s Latinos, who make up nearly half of the city’s population but barely a quarter of the electorate.

“If you look at Antonio, he would be a credible candidate from any ethnic group,” said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, which studies trends in Latino politics. “He has a liberal background, he’s an ex-president of the A.C.L.U. for Southern California, he has union credentials, he was speaker of Assembly. He’s punched his ticket in so many places.”

Dr. Pachon said Mr. Villaraigosa was also able to split the African-American vote, which had been solidly in Mr. Hahn’s column in 2001. It was the first time a Los Angeles mayoral candidate had successfully melded a Latino-black coalition to win office, he said.

“I will never forget where I came from,” Mr. Villaraigosa said Tuesday night. “And I will always believe in the people of Los Angeles.”

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Ralf Schumacher
F1 > Monaco GP, 2004-05-23 (Monte Carlo): Sunday race

Monaco GP: Wednesday press conference
Racing series F1

Date 2005-05-18
Monaco Grand Prix FIA Wednesday press conference transcript with
David Coulthard (Red Bull)
Giancarlo Fisichella (Renault)
Kimi Raikkonen (McLaren)
Jacques Villeneuve (Sauber)
Q: David, you have been a winner here twice in this Grand Prix, two victories that I think you very much savour. A lot of people have been talking up your race this weekend, what is your own view of it?
David Coulthard: I think the Monaco circuit, now they have changed turn one a few years ago to having the kerbs there, and also now they have changed the last part of the swimming pool, it is a lot more of a normal race track, like Canada in a way. We don’t tend to talk about Canada as being that different, despite the barriers being right there, so, for sure, Casino square and around Loews is quite tight, but otherwise two of the areas that used to have more influence have been taken away. That said, I think it will be down to the quickest car and driver combination and we have had five races to see how that varies a little bit, circuit to circuit, so I don’t see an opportunity for us to suddenly be more competitive around here, just because it is Monaco.
Q: How happy have you been, though, with the pace of development of the team, because obviously it is feeling its way a little bit.
David Coulthard: Well, the reality is there have only been small developments on the car, our single lap, low fuel pace in Barcelona was still one second off the pole and I think it is safe to assume that Kimi would have been a bit quicker than Jarno had he not had his mistake, so we would, of course, like more developments. We have the same opportunity as the other Michelin runners, so we need more horsepower and more downforce.
Q: An interesting situation for you with the two boys in the team changing over…
David Coulthard: I’m a boy as well, by the way!
Q: I thought they called you Uncle David, isn’t that true?
David Coulthard: Um, they call me lots of different things, but…
Q: How much does that affect you? Is it an advantage or a disadvantage?
David Coulthard: I don’t think it makes any difference. It is a grown-ups sport, irrespective of whatever age you can get your superlicence, or whether you are 34, it doesn’t matter. You get no benefits, you know, they don’t give you a bus pass because you are a bit older, they don’t give you a grid position for being older, you just have to do the job. I enjoy working with Tonio and Christian and, ultimately, that is important to me and to the harmony within the team.
Q: What I really meant was, is it disconcerting to have different team-mates in that you are getting different feedback from two different people?
David Coulthard: Yeah, but I am not because they both drive at all the Grands Prix, the only thing that is different is who qualifies and races the car. So, testing we all share the workload, racing they chop and change, but ultimately Christian is in the car tomorrow to give us his feedback on tyres and things like that.
Q: Jacques, looking back at the season so far, how do you see it?
Jacques Villeneuve: Well, I am very happy that there was Imola because if not it would have been very difficult to be here now. We seem to have a good pace in the race but have a hard time to qualify the car, unless we are on soft tyres like Imola, so this track could work better than Barcelona.
Q: Do you feel you have chased away some of the problems you had at the start of the season?
Jacques Villeneuve: Yeah, we have worked a lot with the team and we have evolved the car to a position that suits me better and also the team understands what I need to drive the car. We have been having new aerodynamic bits during the season that have helped a lot also.
Q: This is a bit of a one-off as a race, one that you haven’t always necessarily got on well with, how do you see the season as a whole progressing now, and what is you’re aim for the end of the season?
Jacques Villeneuve: It is difficult to have an aim. As long as we can have a few good races, like Imola, then I think we will be alright. What we don’t want is to keep having races like Barcelona. Any track where you need hard tyres, I think, we will be in trouble.
Q: Which are, looking forward?
Jacques Villeneuve: I didn’t go through the races but the ones that are coming should be soft-ish tyres, Nurburgring and also tracks where you have long straight lines where normally you overheat tyres, those should suit us.
Q: So you are quite hopeful for certain races, anyway?
Jacques Villeneuve: Yeah, I think there are a few races where we can do something good if we work well, but at the moment we still lack a bit of pace.
Q: Giancarlo, this circuit hasn’t always been good for you, back in 1998 it was okay but not since then, so what are your feelings about it?
Giancarlo Fisichella: Well, the feeling is pretty good. It is one of my favourite tracks, I feel really confident, I have a great car, we have a new aero package here which is a good step forward and I really feel confident and comfortable in Monaco and I am really excited. I am looking forward, you know, I have the position now for the first qualifying session on the Saturday and I am really confident.
Q: The team won the first four races, then Kimi won the fifth, so who would you see as your major rivals? Is it McLaren, or still Ferrari?
Giancarlo Fisichella: No, for sure, I think McLaren did a fantastic job in the last couple of races, they improved quite a lot with their new aero package, especially in Barcelona. Ferrari was really, really good in Imola but was not so good in Barcelona as Imola, so McLaren has been much more consistent than Ferrari.
Q: We are going into an intense period of four double-headers, eight races in 11 weeks, are you happy with the development programme of Renault? What do you want to see coming from them?
Giancarlo Fisichella: Yeah, I am really happy, I am really happy about the team, about what they did until now and what they are doing for the future. It will be very busy for us in the next couple of months, but the team did a fantastic job on the development, especially as we have another very good step forward in aero package, and for us it is a very busy period because we will have a very busy intensive few months of races, but I like to do more races much more than testing, so I feel comfortable.
Q: So, in a way, you prefer it this way?
Giancarlo Fisichella: Yeah, I prefer it.
Q: Kimi, talking about this intense period of races, how does a driver prepare for them?
Kimi Raikkonen: I don’t do anything different to any other races, so like he said, for me it’s OK, because it is always nice to be racing so I’m happy to go racing, and at least you get them over with quickly.
Q: What about the team’s progress so far, it seems to have been very good?
Kimi Raikkonen: Yeah, I think after the first few races, when we got under way, we had some difficulties, and some bad luck, but we got some new parts when we came to Europe and it has since improved a lot, especially in the last race when we got a new engine again. I think we’re starting to get more and more parts all the time and if we can keep it up, we can improve the car all the time.
Q: Now on this circuit you had a front row of the grid in 2003 followed by second place, but otherwise not fantastic here. How do you regard this race? Is it a bit of a one-off?
Kimi Raikkonen: I actually quite like it. It is not very easy, but last year, with the car that we had, which wasn’t very good and we did quite well until we had an engine problem. I would say that I am feeling okay, I’m pretty confident. I think this is the best car that I have had around here. Looking at last year, how well we did with that car, I think we should be OK but it’s always going to be a difficult weekend and you need to get everything right before you can be really quick.
Q: Is the best car around Barcelona guaranteed to be the best car around Monaco?
Kimi Raikkonen: Not really. I think there is so much difference between those two places. You need very good traction (here). I think the Renault has very good traction, they’re usually very strong on this kind of circuit, as they were last year, but I think that as long as we get everything working we should be OK and we should be able to challenge for victory.
Q: Kimi, do you think, at this moment, it is going to be a championship between yourself and Renault, or do you still think that Ferrari can come back strong even if they are quite a long way behind?
Kimi Raikkonen: I don’t know really, it’s too early to say. There are many races to go and anything can happen, so… We are quite far away from the Renaults but they only need a few bad races and it can turn quickly. You cannot count out the Ferraris yet and you never know the other teams, so let’s just wait and see.
Q: Kimi, Barcelona is a track that normally shows the performance of the car quite well, and now many experts are already saying that you are the real challenger to Alonso. Do you think you have the car to chase him?
Kimi Raikkonen: The car has been very good in the last two races. It was even plain in Barcelona and Imola because we got some new parts and a new engine, so it improve but it’s too early to say. It’s pretty much the same answer, there are so many races to go. You just need a few bad races and you’re out completely or it can turn around again, so we just do our best and we don’t have much to lose, so we try to win the races and score more points than the leaders. We just do our best.
Q: The last time Michael Schumacher went six races without winning was ’96/’97. He has now not won for the last six races, counting the last race of last year. What do you think of this? Is it the downfall of Ferrari? Is it Michael maybe losing a bit of his edge or is it just a short period of uncompetitiveness?
David Coulthard: I think it is quite clear for everyone that it’s more to do with tyres than anything else. I think Imola would show that. It’s a long season. You can only write the ‘Downfall of Ferrari’ chapter once you get to the end of the season, if they’re still struggling, and even then, maybe we have to say that the tyres were clearly a bigger factor. I don’t think he is losing his edge.
Jacques Villeneuve: David is right.
Giancarlo Fisichella: It is Formula One, it happens. You have a period where for three or four years Ferrari can win, three or four years when McLaren, Renault, Williams or whoever. I think that period is maybe finished for Ferrari, I don’t know. I think they still have a very good package. In Imola they were one-and-a-half seconds quicker than everyone else during the race. One of the main reasons could be even the tyres, but I think they are there.
Q: And Michael isn’t losing his edge?
Giancarlo Fisichella: I don’t think so.
Kimi Raikkonen: I think if you put the same Michelin tyres on that car they would be at the front end again. I think they have some problems with their tyres, but they can as easily find some new tyres for this race and they can win the race, so I don’t know.
Q: Kimi, have you ever got angry about anything, and jumped up and down and shouted?
Kimi Raikkonen: Yeah, many times but of course you’re not happy if you retire or something but I guess it mostly happens more in normal life than in racing.
Q: Can you give us examples?
Kimi Raikkonen: No, not really.
Q: What are the kind of things that make you angry in normal life, as you say?
Kimi Raikkonen: If you keep asking (questions like those). (Laughter)
Q: So what sort of things make you angry, Kimi? No really, what is it? The way other human beings react? You’re a very cool, calm…
Kimi Raikkonen: Normal things make you angry. It depends really. If someone comes and hits you of course you’re going to get angry.
Q: David, in the past, I believe you had members of the McLaren team staying in your hotel here. Are they back this year?
David Coulthard: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. They’re very good clients, they spend a lot in the bar, and we enjoy having McLaren there.
Q: ITV are there as well, I think.
David Coulthard: Are they? I’m not sure. I know Martin (Brundle) is staying in my studio apartment next door to mine, but I’m not sure about the others.
Q: Does he pay for that?
David Coulthard: No, he’s my guest.
-fia

Monaco GP: Red Bull preview
Racing series F1

Date 2005-05-15
Some say it’s the humour. Others say it’s the epic sweep. Many believe it’s the memorable characters. Everyone finds something to love in the Star Wars Saga, but one thing everyone agrees on: No film series has more thrilling action than the tale of a galaxy far, far away. And what is a better place to promote the film than during the Monaco Grand Prix weekend.
With the famous Cannes Film Festival taking place just a few kilometres down the coast from Monte Carlo, Red Bull Racing and the makers of the Star Wars films are staging a promotional partnership over the weekend of the Monaco Grand Prix. “Revenge of the Sith” is the sixth film and is due to go on general release shortly. The film’s director, George Lucas and some of the stars of the film will be guests of the team in Monaco.
David Coulthard:
“There’s something special about driving round the Monaco GP circuit. The first time I drove a GP car here I was sure that my back wheel would catch the barrier at some of the tighter corners, it just didn’t look possible to squeeze the car through.”
“To be the fastest car around Monaco you need to have the wall of the rear tyre just kissing the barrier at several places on the circuit, which is an intense experience because of the concentration it takes. One slip and it’s all over, there’s nowhere you can relax. I’ve won Monaco twice and I drove one of the best laps of my life to take pole there too. I’ll be happy if we can come home in the points again and I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to.”
Tonio Liuzzi:
“I have raced here twice before in F3000: two years ago I had a big crash and last year I won. I like the challenge of this place, because you are faced with the two options of being quick and accurate or ending up in the wall. I’ve never been a big fan of street circuits, but Monaco is something special and I love it. The atmosphere is fantastic.”
“The trick here is to have confidence in yourself and in the car. You need a different approach, because with no run-off areas, you can’t tell yourself you will brake later and see what the car does. I am feeling confident and well prepared and our car is good in terms of traction, which is very important here, so I think we can have a good weekend. The only negative thing is that I will be first on track for Saturday’s qualifying.”
Christian Horner, Sporting director:
“In many respects Monaco is the highlight of the Grand Prix calendar and is certainly a huge challenge for both drivers and teams. It is currently the only street race of the year and its unique layout makes overtaking virtually impossible to achieve. David has a fantastic track record at this circuit having won there twice. I also have fond memories of Tonio winning F3000 there last year.”
“Red Bull Racing are collaborating with the new Star Wars movie, Return of the Sith, in Monaco. Characters from the movie will be guests of the team in the paddock and on the grid, which I’m sure will generate a great deal of interest. Monaco is the perfect setting to promote a movie and we are delighted to be part of the fun. Hopefully the force will be with us!”
Gunther Steiner, Technical Director:
“The test programme in Paul Ricard went well. We got all our tyre testing done and we are very happy with the choice of tyres that Michelin has provided. We also tested some aerodynamic parts that we will introduce at this grand prix. They will give us more efficiency, which is very important at this circuit.”
“Traction control is another area that we focused on during the test. With our current test programme we hope that we can continue to make improvements to keep up with the progress that the big teams are making.”
Simon Corbyn, Head of Race Engineering, Cosworth:
“The unique nature of the Monaco circuit places maximum emphasis on good engine driveability and effective engine control systems. Cosworth have no concerns with the two TJ2005 race engines carried forward from the Barcelona GP and we will run with increased engine performance in the race at Monaco. Cosworth are well prepared for this event.”
-redbul