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Kubica hampered by "fragile" Williams losing parts

Robert Kubica has expressed his frustration after his Williams Formula 1 car lost a piece of bodywork early in FP1 at Hockenheim.

Kubica, who was running a new aero package on his FW42, said that the issue compromised his day, as he lost time in the garage.

“We didn’t have an easy today, compromised already on the installation lap,” he said when asked by Motorsport.com. “We’ll have to revise everything and fix some parts in order that they stay attached to the car. It’s the second weekend in a row that something is breaking down.

“When you leave the garage and already on the installation lap you are, let’s say, compromised... It’s very important for us to do our programme which we set up, unfortunately we were influenced by this straight away, so it wasn’t an easy day.”

He added: “We hope we can fix it. We were a bit too fragile, that’s how it is, so we have to make sure everything will stay attached to the car, and hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.”

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Kubica said it was hard to give a verdict on any improvement generated by the new package.

“Conditions are completely different, the track is different, and the tyre are operating in different windows, so it’s impossible to judge.

“Of course I have a feeling, but if you ask me to compare Silverstone, which was 18C, with 38C and completely different track, it’s impossible to compare unless you have a magic ball.”

Claire Williams confirmed that the new package will also be tried by George Russell on Saturday, after a second set of parts arrived in Germany.

“Definitely looking forward to putting a bit more performance on the car,” said Russell when asked by Motorsport.com. “I think you always look forward to that, but today it's very difficult to know exactly what the improvements were.

“We were on different run plans on different parts of the track due to different circumstances. So difficult to get a back-to-back, but the first times seemed relatively expected.

“I think it was very unrepresentative for the weekend. I think it's the same for everybody down the grid. We've learned some things, got a lot of evaluating to do tonight of the parts Robert tested.”