Williams still hopeful for points after disappointing qualifying session

The AT&T Williams team was disappointed not to participate in the final qualifying session at Albert Park today and the team will start 12th and 15th on tomorrow’s grid, but do expect to show a stronger relative race performance. The team has worked hard to improve poor reliability during 2006 and hopes to have both cars finishing well tomorrow.

Nico Rosberg "It was a bit difficult to get it right today as the car was quite loose, so I couldn’t really attack and I made a few mistakes. It’s unfortunate because it’s about time all our work started to produce some results. Twelfth on the grid is obviously not what we were hoping for as we are all determined to get ahead of where we were last year."

Alex Wurz "It was interesting to see how the qualifying sessions work from a driver’s point of view, I’d have to say it is fairly brutal. Naturally I’m disappointed not to make it into the top ten, but it would have been difficult to achieve this and on my last run I lost three or four tenths at turn 15 when I slid a bit wide. Yesterday we did some strong long runs, so the race is a different story, even if I have to start from 15th."

Sam Michael, Technical Director "It was obviously a disappointing qualifying session not to be able to get either cars into the top ten as we’d thought we had enough pace to do that from the practice sessions. We will need to look carefully at the data tonight to see if we can squeeze anything more from the cars for tomorrow’s race. Our main target tomorrow is to be reliable and see if we can score some points."