Special sidepod livery for Williams

The FW28s of Alex Wurz, Nico Rosberg and Mark Webber today carried sidepod livery to celebrate Petrobras’ achieving oil self-sufficiency for Brazil as annual production in 2006 has reached 1,910,000 barrels per day. This major resource advantage, the privilege of only a few developed nations in the world, in the context of increasing oil scarcity, has been achieved through groundbreaking extraction techniques in deep and ultra deep waters.

Sam Michael, Technical Director, WilliamsF1 “We had a productive day with Alex’s car today and we went through the whole programme, particularly checking tyres. The tyre choice will be difficult, but we have plenty of data to go through to assist the engineers with this. Alex also tried a couple of different mechanical set-ups specific to the Imola circuit. We did two runs with Nico’s car to give him more track time and one run with Mark’s car to check the balance, so it was normal activity for a Friday.”

Alex Wurz “We completed a busy test programme today, so now we have to sit down and carefully analyse what did what and how it should translate to the race cars. My role is purely to evaluate our options and I spent all my time conducting long runs, which is why we do not appear higher up in the timing results, but this doesn’t worry me at all. We just have to pull our whole package together a bit tighter and then we will be competitive.”

Mark Webber “I had a few laps at the end of the session to help with the tyre selections - not as many laps as you might like, but I’ll make up for it tomorrow. The balance feels about right and we have lots of good information from Alex to look through tonight.”

Nico Rosberg “I think today’s sessions went well and Alex did a good job again to find the right set-up, so I immediately had quite a good balance when I first went out. We divided my activity in two runs so I had a bit of time to look at data comparisons. All in all, the performance felt quite good today.”

Simon Corbyn, Head of F1 Race Engineering, Cosworth Ltd “All three CA2006 engines ran without problems today. As usual for Friday, Alex completed the bulk of the running and evaluated the effect of some engine map changes. The data will be checked tonight prior to finalising Mark & Nico’s engine plans for Saturday & Sunday.”