Bad luck for Williams

As, after the third free practice session of the weekend, the Williams F1 Team changed the engines of both their cars, both Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg will get a ten place grid penalty. Mark Webber qualified 10th and Nico Rosberg 12th. So Webber will be 20th on the grid and Rosberg 22nd and last.

Sam Michael, Technical Director, WilliamsF1 “After morning practice we undertook engine changes on both cars which obviously changed our strategy for qualifying. Although this is a clear set-back in terms of start position and we will be starting the race from an unfamiliar position at the back of the grid, we are still determined to do everything we can to get the cars into the points. Our long runs in all the practice sessions have been competitive and that will help us in the race tomorrow.”

Mark Webber “Because of the grid penalty due to the engine change today, we obviously had to choose the right strategy for the race and I think our engineers have done the best job given the situation that we are in. We’ll try hard in the race, but we couldn’t really expect a huge deal more from qualifying. I tried to maybe go a bit too hard on my last lap and made a little mistake on turn three, losing a bit of time there, but I had nothing to lose, as I am going back anyway. I just scraped into the last ten while everyone else was obviously running on low fuel.”

Nico Rosberg “Again I missed those two little extra tenths that I needed to find in order to make it into Q3. With the grip increasing and only having one lap to fully exploit it, plenty of experience is very useful. Still, at least now I have the advantage of being able choose my fuel load for the race. I will be starting towards the back from where I will push. We have worked towards having a good race plan, so I think we can still do well.”

Simon Corbyn, Head of F1 Race Engineering, Cosworth Ltd “Cosworth identified some concerns with the engines after morning practice today and we could not therefore be confident of reliability. We have decided in consultation with Williams to change engines for both drivers prior to qualifying and we will unfortunately have to accept the ten place grid penalty for both cars. However, we took the opportunity to install the first upgraded ‘Series 4’ race engines and the session itself ran without incident.”