Friday: Busy day for Williams

Williams had a very studious day today. From tire assessment to optimizing settings, the entire program was followed and completed. The team can focus tomorrow on fine-tuning all the parameters, but according to Nico Rosberg, the team has little room for maneuver at this level.

Williams’ strength traditionally being its chassis, it is natural to find Nico Rosberg in second place in the standings in the second sector. This sector includes all the slow corners of the track and therefore requires an efficient chassis. However, the FW29 recorded the lowest top speeds of the day and will need to somewhat adjust its settings to avoid being an easy target at the end of the straight. Nico Rosberg improved his time by 0.6 seconds between the two sessions, while his teammate, Kazuki Nakajima, only made a small improvement of 0.1 seconds. But the Japanese driver claims he didn’t have the opportunity to record a better time… notably due to the weather…

Nico Rosberg – 8th and 8th:

Today’s focus was on evaluating the tires for both qualifying and the race. We have a rough idea of what we’ll do, but it’s not entirely clear for the race—everything depends on how the track will evolve. We also spent time determining our level of aerodynamic downforce, but it’s always difficult, and sometimes you have to make compromises. On one hand, you want to be as fast as possible with lap times; on the other, you want to ensure other drivers can’t overtake us at the end of the straight. We’ve opted for sensible settings and sought to optimize them. I don’t think we can improve further on this point. Overall, we had a good day of work and we’re where we need to be.

Kazuki Nakajima – 6th and 14th:

The weather was tricky today but, fortunately, we still managed to get enough laps in dry conditions. We worked a lot on many points and we know which direction to take tomorrow. Each time I put on new sets of tires, the fog came down again, so I wasn’t able to record very good times today.

Rob Nelson – Chief Engineer

«As usual, we covered our standard Friday program. Optimizing car balance, settings for qualifying as well as for longer stints with a significant fuel load. Obviously, the first session was disrupted by rain. It rained more during the first session this morning than we expected and less than we anticipated in the afternoon. But it didn’t affect us too much.»