Constructive start to Monaco weekend for Williams

The AT&T Williams team had a constructive start to their preparations for the Monaco Grand Prix in today's three hours of free practice on the Principality's streets. As is typical of a street circuit, the track conditions progressively improved, with the best lap times in the afternoon session a clear second faster than in themorning.

Over the day, the field has also bunched considerably from over six seconds difference across the 22 car field to just less than three and a half seconds as teams worked to improve their set-ups.

Monaco however claimed its usual high toll of damaged cars with five teams all facing varying degrees of repair work to their cars tonight. Nico Rosberg and Alex Wurz kept a tidy account and ran both sessions just inside and outside the top ten respectively.

Nico Rosberg "It is obviously a lot of fun to drive here in Monaco. The sessions were difficult for us to start with and initially I really wasn’t happy with the car. But step by step we started to find a direction and with the track rubbering in, the car seemed to just go better and better. We made our improvements with mechanical and aero changes and I am pleased with where we ended up. I think we can have a good weekend."

Alex Wurz "Throughout all the running this morning I had some balance problems, so we ran through a range of set-ups and by the end of the afternoon session I was up for a very good lap time, but unfortunately traffic and yellow flags got in the way. Nevertheless, I am quite pleased with where we ended up with the chassis balance and I think I could be right up with the first eight guys, which I am comfortable with. We gained much and lost nothing today and I enjoyed myself out there."

Sam Michael, Technical Director "Today was a normal Monaco Thursday, working through set up for the race and making sure the race balance is good as well as doing some work on qualifying with new tyres. We checked all our systems – brakes, cooling etc – and everything is fine. Nico and Alex worked on their set ups to collect some good data. Now we’ll go through all of the changes to get the best out of the car for Saturday and Sunday."