Williams struggle to get tyres warmed up
Williams didn't have the greatest of Fridays at Canada, with the team struggling to get the tyres up to temperature in the mixed conditions. This also caught out Pastor Maldonado as he crashed out in the closing stages of FP1.
Mike Coughlan, Technical Director: "We couldn’t complete our full test programme during FP1 due to the wet weather, so we just did some limited running to get a feel for the car. We had an incident towards the end of the session with Pastor hitting the wall after running off line on a drying track and damaging the nose and front wing. He didn’t damage any of the parts we were planning to carry through to qualifying though so it didn’t compromise us too much. In FP2 we got straight to work with both cars on different rear wing configurations with Valtteri also doing some front wing comparisons while Pastor completed some tyre work. Our main limitation in the conditions today was getting the tyres up to temperature quickly enough. Once everything was up to temperature the car looked better so that is something we will be looking at tonight."
Pastor Maldonado: "The conditions were tough this morning. There was a dry line towards the end of FP1 but on cold tyres I put a wheel off-line and I crashed. This afternoon was better as we completed our full programme, however, we still need to work to get a better feeling in the car and we need to focus on getting the tyres working quicker. Despite the changeable conditions we managed to get a lot of data today which we can assess ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying."
Valtteri Bottas: "The first session was quite tricky for everyone and difficult to test anything even as the track was drying out towards the end. This afternoon was good for us though as we did a number of both short and long runs gathering a lot of data. Nevertheless it’s difficult to see where we are from today’s sessions. It’s the first time I’ve driven here in Montreal and it was good to get the mileage in and I certainly enjoy the layout. Overall I’m feeling positive after today, but we still need to look through the data before we decide which parts and set-up options to run for the rest of the weekend."
