Australian GP Williams Friday notes

BMW WilliamsF1 Team drivers Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya were 6th and 15th quickest respectively in the first Free Practice sessions of the 2001 season, for the Australian Grand Prix.

Ralf Schumacher "We are not really there where we would like to be but the season is just at the start the gap to the top is bigger than we expected and we need to work on that. We struggled with understeer, which appears to be tyre related. But this is no surprise, with Michelin we are in a completely new situation. I believe anyway that tomorrow we could qualify in the top eight."

Juan Pablo Montoya "I've been struggling a bit with the set up of the car today. In the first session the car was definitely better than in the second. But I've done some learning today, on a track that was completely new to me. The main problem for us was a big understeer and when you have such a problem you loose a lot of time. All in all, we collected useful data to work on the car and get it ready for tomorrow and this is the most important task."

Patrick Head (Technical Director, WilliamsF1) "A useful first day, where both the cars ran without technical problems and covered a lot of work that we need to do for race conditions. We collected enough information in order to choose our tyre for the race and will be focusing this afternoon and tonight on trying to optimise the car for qualifying tomorrow."

Gerhard Berger (BMW Motorsport Director) "Even though free practice sessions are not generally very reliable evidence, several things became obvious today: Ferrari and McLaren-Mercedes are setting the pace again and the strength of Jordan is confirmed. Our gap to the top is bigger than expected, we have to analyse the reasons why. A clear positive is that no technical problems showed up, neither on the engine nor on the car side and therefore we could do many laps and tried a lot of things. Ralf was consistent. Juan Pablo was facing the task to set up the car for the first time under the pressure of a Grand Prix weekend on a circuit he has never raced on before. It is not easy for him but he makes every effort."

-Williams-