US GP: Williams Friday practice notes

Comments from the Williams team after Friday practices for the US Grand Prix

Sam Michael, Technical Director, WilliamsF1:

"We had a really productive day in terms of set-up and checking the tyres for Sunday. On Alex's car, we spent the whole day on full race set-up, doing long runs to make sure the tyre is solid for the race. Now Bridgestone will check the tyres carefully to make sure there are no issues caused by the extreme demands of the banking here round the Indy circuit. All the normal systems -- cooling, brakes etc -- are running fine. Now we will work on the qualifying set-up for tomorrow."

Alex Wurz:

"I went through all of our programme and I think I delivered everything I was required to find out. If you study our programme it is pretty clear what we did, so I am actually reasonably happy with the progress we have made in terms of preparing us for the race. Looking at the way the track is going with our tyres, I think we could end up in a good position for the race."

Mark Webber:

"The session seemed okay, but obviously we will have to go through everything tonight. I haven't really had a look at what other people are doing relative to ourselves. The balance isn't too bad, but we still have to find some grip and we will look at this later. The programme ran faultlessly, Alex did his bit, as did the race drivers, so not a bad day for us."

Nico Rosberg:

"The main target for me today was learning this track and I got on pretty well with it. We made some changes throughout the session which moved us in the right direction and the car improved. Driving through the bank of the Speedway is interesting, but I am not sure I would enjoy driving an entire race round an oval!"

Sean O'Mahony, Principal Engineer -- F1 Race Engineering, Cosworth Ltd:

"After carrying out further checks on Nico's engine from Montreal we found some distortion which could have been caused by the race crash. Therefore we decided to change the engine for this weekend. There were no issues with the fresh engine today, we also had no problems with the engines in Mark's and Alex's cars."

Mark Webber
Chassis: FW28 03
Engine: CA2006/019, 2nd GP
Practice session 1: no time
Practice session 2: 1:13.961, 12th, 15 laps

Nico Rosberg
Chassis: FW28 04
Engine: CA2006/022, 1st GP*
Practice session 1: no time
Practice session 2: 1:14.562, 24th, 17 laps

Alex Wurz
Chassis: FW28 06
Engine: CA2006/021
Practice session 1: 1:14.475, 8th, 38 laps
Practice session 2: 1:14.050, 19th, 39 laps

*Nico's engine was changed on Thursday following inspection of accident damage from the Canadian GP

-williams-