Team Talk - Friday at Austin

Williams

Motor Racing - Formula One World Championship - United States Grand Prix - Practice Day - Austin, USA

Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering: “We’ve missed a complete session, we didn’t even start FP2 before it was cancelled due to the weather. That’s a great deal of learning that we’ve missed out on, but it’s the same for everybody. FP1 was also a bit of a washout with us just getting a little bit of work done on the intermediate tyre. There were some interesting results coming up, but learning for this weekend has been pretty minimal. We just have to see what the weather brings tomorrow and be ready with our different contingency plans.”

Valtteri Bottas: “We had a bit of running this morning, so with both cars we were trying some different setup changes to learn more about the wet weather and our performance. We did struggle today with front tyre graining. It would have been nice to go out again and try something different. We managed to get into the top 10, which is slightly better than we’ve seen, but we still have a lot of work to do in the wet. We can’t change the weather and it’s the same for everyone so we’ll take it as it comes. Hopefully it’s dry for Sunday, that’s the main thing.”

Felipe Massa: “Not a lot happened today. We did a few laps on the wet tyre in the first session, which was ok to drive and gave us some ideas for the setup. We didn’t run in the second session as it was raining a lot. We just need to wait to see if it will be possible to drive tomorrow. It’s not nice to see the weather like this, so I hope it gets better for everyone.”