German race defined by bad start for Williams duo
Starting on the dirty side of the grid in P8 and P10, the pair of Williams FW32s, driven by Rubens Barrichello and Nico Hulkenberg, struggled to make a clean start to this afternoon’s German Grand Prix at the Hockenheimring.
With both Barrichello and Hulkenberg having lost track position in the early phase of the race, the team had little opportunity to reclaim the ground and despite a clear step up in recent car performance, which was demonstrated again in qualifying, both cars finished frustratingly outside of the points.
Rubens Barrichello: "I had a very difficult start to the race, my pull away was not very good. I was running in position for the hairpin when Kobayashi’s move on the inside left no braking margin, which backed everybody up. During both stints on the option and prime tyre, our pace was much the same as the cars in front, but having lost track position, there wasn’t enough pace differential to make up position."
Nico Hulkenberg: "Really the race today was defined by the start, which for me was not good and the places lost could not be recovered. I ran a long first stint on the option tyre, which was the right thing to do given our position, but it was very hard to make any progress taking the option tyre to lap 34. The car pace wasn’t really there today and with a pretty uneventful race, there wasn’t even the possibility of an unexpected opportunity to reclaim some advantage."
Sam Michael, Technical Director: "It was not a satisfying outcome to miss out on points today. We struggled with poor starts on both cars which dropped us a couple of positions immediately. With similar pace to all the cars around us, we then tried two quite different strategies to recover, but nothing went wrong with the other team strategies, so we couldn't make a difference. We'll now look to improvements for next week’s race in Budapest."
