Williams try another set of new components
Williams have taken yet another host of aerodynamic upgrades to a race weekend, now including new front and rear wings, and a new floor. Both drivers evaluated them, but due to the rain, information was less than the team hoped to gather.
Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer:
Running the new aero package, consisting of revised front and rear wings and a new floor, both drivers had a trouble free first practice session, albeit in wet conditions. With the conditions as they were, there was obviously limited running, with the track drying extremely slowly. We then ran inters throughout P2 as the drivers who moved onto dry tyres seemed to struggle with grip levels. Rubens ran a full session working on car balance while Pastor's session was curtailed at the end by a minor water leak. Looking forward to tomorrow, we have a lot of work to do in P3 having run neither the soft nor the supersoft tyre. Today’s conditions have set the scene for an interesting qualifying and race.
Rubens Barrichello:
It was too wet to do much running this morning and this afternoon was only marginally better. We tried to go for a dry tyre late on in P2 but conditions were still too wet so we avoided it. The track was very slippery but the tyres actually held on quite well considering the number of laps we did. Because of today’s conditions it’s hard to make a reasonable judgement as to how we are going to perform compared to the other teams at this stage.
Pastor Maldonado:
The rain cost me a lot of track time today which isn’t ideal because I haven’t driven here before. When I did get out I picked up the track quite quickly and I like it, particularly the third sector. It is a very interesting circuit, with a mix of slow, medium and fast corners. That makes it’s quite technical so we will need a fundamentally well balanced car. We will work hard to achieve that overnight and in third practice tomorrow so we are in the best possible shape for qualifying.
