Williams Spanish GP Friday Practice Report

Circuit de Catalunya

SPANISH GRAND PRIX PRACTICE

Objectives P1
• Evaluation of new aero parts including a new exhaust system, rear wing and brake ducts
• Testing of Pirelli’s new super hard tyre

Rubens Barrichello, Williams F1 Team

Photo by: xpb.cc

Objectives P2
• Further evaluation of the team’s new aero parts
• Qualifying set-up work

Sam Michael, Technical Director

We went through all of our programme today which included running the new aero parts on both cars at various stages. We have plenty of data to look at tonight to finalise the specification that we'll race this weekend. Some parts of the floor are certainly on the limit, so we'll take that into consideration. We didn't have any reliability issues today.

Rubens Barrichello

Pastor Maldonado, AT&T Williams

Photo by: xpb.cc

We have tested all the new parts we have in Barcelona. On track, the rear wing looked alright but we need to look closer at how the new floor performed. It was very hot today so the grip level was lower and therefore the car was sliding more and tyre wear was greater. The car was oversteering a bit as well. I think we need to look at this for the weekend to try to minimise the problems and maximise our set-up, but I think at this stage we’d be looking at four stops minimum in the race on Sunday.

Pastor Maldonado

I think today was good overall. We completed our full testing programme which I’m happy about and we also did a few longer runs in FP2. It’s difficult to compare ourselves to other teams as we don’t know what they were doing, but everything seems to be going well. We have a number of upgrades but we still need time to analyse the data.