Q+A with Williams' Rod Nelson
After a hot European Grand Prix weekend at the Valencia street circuit, the Williams F1 Team Chief Operations Engineer, Rod Nelson, discusses the positives and negatives of the Grove-based outfit's race and looks ahead to the challenge of Spa-Francorchamps.
"Although it felt very hot in Valencia, temperatures weren’t actually that high; it just felt extremely hot due to the high humidity levels. As a comparison, air temperatures at the Bahrain Grand Prix reached 39°C with just 10% humidity, while temperatures were just 31°C in Valencia but humidity levels hit 60%."
Were there any tyre wear issues on either car?"We didn’t have any significant tyre wear problems, no. We experienced a little graining on the front left tyre, but it didn't have any significant impact on performance."
How much did the track conditions change over the course of the weekend?"Although the circuit wasn't too dusty, the track was quite green in the early stages of Friday’s practice session because there wasn't any rubber on the track. We were running the softest Bridgestone tyres which laid plenty of rubber down and that certainly helped increase grip levels. On average, that improved the lap times by approximately one second per lap in each session."
What caused the technical problem on Kazuki's car during qualifying, and where could he have qualified without it?"We had an issue with the throttle control system on Kazuki's car during his second run in qualifying. We have a safety system in place which shuts the engine down if it detects that the throttles are not following the driver’s demand, so this kicked in and stopped Kazuki out on track.
Both Nico and Kazuki were close all weekend up to this point so he should certainly have made it into the top ten. It's very difficult to be accurate when the grid is so tight, but I estimate he should have qualified between sixth and ninth."
"KERS wasn't a big issue at the start for two reasons. Firstly, turn one isn't always taken flat out at the start of the race (particularly if you are on the dirty, left-hand side of the track (where Raikkonen was), so the KERS cars can't use the additional 80 horsepower anyway. Secondly, it's also then a relatively short distance to the first serious braking point for turn two."
Nico finished less than a second behind Heikki Kovalainen. Was fourth place ever really on the cards for him?"We were aiming for Nico to finish ahead of Raikkonen and that was achievable. However, in the early part of Nico's second stint, we unexpectedly lost some performance for about 10 laps and that consigned us to finishing not only behind Raikkonen, but also behind Kovalainen as well."
What caused Kazuki's puncture on lap 39, and why wasn't he able to finish the race?"When the tread of the rear left tyre was returned to us we saw a large cut which we believe was the cause of the tyre failure. Grosjean apparently had similar damage to one of his tyres. It seems likely that the damage was caused by something on the track, a kerb for example.
We saw on the telemetry data that there could have been possible damage to the gearbox caused by Kazuki driving back to the pits with the punctured tyre. As we didn't want to have a potentially dangerous failure out on-track, we retired the car."
"We’ve seen over the past few races that the FW31 is pretty competitive at most types of track. We are also introducing some new aero components for Spa which should help us to maintain our relative competitiveness so we are optimistic for a good result."
