Satisfying day for Williams

At the first day of action at the Grand Prix weekend in Bahrain, Alexander Wurz, the third driver of the Williams F1 Team did a great job during the free practice session. Both Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg only came out of the pits in the second free practice session. It was the debut of Nico Rosberg at a Grand Prix weekend.

Sam Michael, Technical Director, WilliamsF1 “Alex did a great job today, he didn’t put a foot wrong and gave us some really good data on the tyres for Bridgestone and our mechanical & traction control set-up for the weekend. All the importantvariables such as brakes and cooling are looking spot-on . Mark and Nico just did a short run each at the end of the day, to preserve their mileage for tomorrow’s running and so far, things are going to plan and we’re looking really competitive. We had no mechanical problems at all on the FW28”

Alex Wurz “It’s the first Friday of a new season with a new team, so today was quite a busy day for me. We are very happy with the work we achieved because it was what we were aiming to, in terms of tyre choice, mechanical set-up and electronic set-up. I think we have done quite a good job and the lap times reflect this. I was quite happy with my long runs. We will have to wait until tomorrow to see how competitive we are.”

Mark Webber “Doing a few laps at the end of the session is not easy in terms of getting yourself into the right position. I had a little bit of traffic in the first lap and then there was a yellow flag, so I got very little clear running. I know it’s the same for everyone, but my only clean lap was probably the last one. That
said, it’s good to have Alex here doing the work for us and the race cars went out just to make sure everything is working ok and we’ll get some more mileage tomorrow. We have a lot of work to do in terms of balance and other things, but all-in-all, it was a very good day for Williams and Cosworth, our overall reliability was good and we did everything we planned.”

Nico Rosberg “At last, I could finally drive today! I found it is quite different out on the track compared to competing here in GP2, especially in terms of finding your way and identifying your braking points. It’s just a matter of settling into it, really and initially I made quite a few mistakes over the few laps I drove. Other than that, I am quite pleased with the work we have done today.”

Simon Corbyn, Head of F1 Race Engineering, Cosworth “Cosworth have had a good first day in Bahrain with Williams and we completed all the planned running with no real problems, which is pretty satisfying after all the hard work everybody has put in. I have to say Alex did a great job in the T-car and generated a lot of useful information for the weekend.”