San Marino GP: Williams Friday qualifying notes

BMW WilliamsF1 Team cars qualified today next to each other in third and fourth position, directly after both Ferraris. Drivers Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya will leave the garage for tomorrow's final qualifying as 18th and 17th respectively.

Ralf Schumacher:

"I am quite happy with the outcome of my First Qualifying. We have made progress, especially on the mechanical side. For every race we bring new parts for our FW25 now and BMW has built a strong engine which pays off here as well. It was clear that I had some oversteer in a couple of corners which might have cost about two or three tenths of a second. But I am confident we will be able to sort this out by tommorow."

Juan Pablo Montoya:

"I am pretty happy because the car was very good. I think I could have been quicker but after what happened in Brazil, today I decided to take the more conservative option. After I saw the sector signs I knew that I didn't have to push too hard. Coming out of the second Rivazza, I went on the power and I had some oversteer so I had to get off the throttle and lost a little bit of time."

Sam Michael (Chief Operations Engineer, WilliamsF1):

"This is obviously a good start to the weekend. Juan made a mistake on his lap coming out of the second Rivazza corner and Ralf made a couple of mistakes in sector three. But our performance is definitely improving. We have introduced a couple of aerodynamic components for this race and it is good to see the chassis works well with these changes. We are looking forward to tomorrow."

Gerhard Berger (BMW Motorsport Director):

"This was the first time we were running the new parts on our cars in normal track and weather conditions. Our result shows a big step forward. It shows what the potential of our car is. Both our drivers made some small mistakes therefore I am very pleased they could achieve positions three and four. On Sunday, there could be a place on the podium for us."

Ralf Schumacher: 3rd
Chassis: FW25 03 (Spare Car FW25 02)
Best time: 1.21,193 min

Juan Pablo Montoya: 4th
Chassis: FW25 04
Best time: 1.21,490 min

-williams-