Williams F1 Team: Day 1 - Free Practice Report
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Sep 05, 2008
Williams
By the end of this afternoon’s practice session, the AT&T Williams team began to derive some gains from the new development parts brought to the FW30 for this race, despite variable weather conditions which made optimisation of these components a more complicated task. Nico Rosberg closed out the day in P6, although Kazuki Nakajima will be looking to improve his feel in the car in tomorrow morning’s last practice session ahead of qualifying.
Nico Rosberg:
The morning didn’t start too well and we weren’t looking so good, so we made some bigset-up changes over lunch and we definitely improved and found some clear direction. We have some new development parts on the car, which have helped our pace even if the conditions have been too variable to really get the most out of them today. If I think about it, our experience today has been much like last year when we struggled here on Friday but improved a lot over the course of the weekend. So we have taken some good steps forward today, but of course we still need to find some more performance tomorrow to close up to those in front of us.
Kazuki Nakajima:
In the morning, conditions weren’t too bad, even if we had to improve our lap times considerably. We made some set-up changes, but I found this afternoon was much trickier. I was struggling to get a good feeling from the car. I’ll be looking to find overall grip in tomorrow’s practice session, and if I manage to do this, then I will be able to pushmore.
Sam Michael, Technical Director:
It was a pretty difficult day with weather causing variable conditions for everyone today, especially in the afternoon. We had to alter our P2 programme quite a bit, but we still managed to generate some data and set-up information for the car and tonight we will use that work towards the best set-up for qualifying. We experienced no mechanical problems today.
