Austria: In retreat, Williams drivers are not worried
The Williams drivers are aiming for a strong performance this weekend in Austria, but this Friday, Bottas could not do better than 4th fastest in FP1 and Massa 9th also in FP1. However, the Grove team is not worried about their situation, having focused on testing new components today.
Expected to deliver after their strong performance at the Red Bull Ring in 2014, the Williams team didn’t entirely meet the expectations in these first tests held in Austria. However, this was largely because the Grove team had new parts to test, so speed was not the priority.
As Rob Smedley, head of performance, explains, everything went well with these new elements and now we need to analyze their potential benefit for the rest of the weekend: « We had a few new parts to test today, so we ran different configurations throughout the day. We collected a lot of data from both drivers and cars that we will now analyze tonight to ensure we are getting the most out of our package. »
Valtteri Bottas confirms that today’s objective was not to be the fastest but to test and break in the new parts: « Our objective today was to put the new parts we had to the test and they all seem to be working as expected, which is encouraging. We have high hopes for this weekend and we are still in the race to achieve it. »
Like his teammate, Felipe Massa had a heavy workload, but everything went well for the Brazilian on the Austrian track this Friday: « We had a good day with a lot to do in terms of settings. We had a slight problem when we went out to do our fast laps, but we corrected it and I felt comfortable afterward. »
