Team Talk - Thursday in Monaco

Williams

Valtteri Bottas
“We did a lot of laps today. The car set-up felt better than what we have tried here before. At the same time, it was more difficult to drive, with quite a bit of oversteer, so I was a little nervous. I had a bit of a moment in FP1, but that’s part of it. It’s a tough track. The times are looking very close, so any gain we can make before qualifying will be very useful.”

Felipe Massa
“It was a difficult morning, losing so much time in the session when I could have been driving. I missed a lot of laps, and we know in Monaco it is important to be on the track all the time you can. It was not a very good afternoon for us. We struggled to get good lap times. We’re missing grip and traction, so we need to work on the car to try to improve and make it more competitive for this track, especially for the race. It is a very special weekend where I always enjoy driving, seeing the fans and how special this race is for them – so I hope we can do well for them.”

Rob Smedley, head of performance engineering
“It was a typical Monaco Thursday, with everything thrown at it. We had the unfortunate incident with Felipe in FP1, and the guys in the garage did a brilliant job to get him back out for FP2. We’ve got everything done that we needed to between the cars, despite that. It’s just unfortunate that Felipe has missed some running on the track, which is really important in Monaco. He’ll have to recover from that on Saturday morning. Valtteri got through everything we wanted. We’ve done long enough runs on each of the tyre compounds, so we’ve got a good idea how they’ll behave. Now it’s a case of getting ourselves ready for Saturday. There’s a lot to do and look through, as usual, but fortunately we’ve got an extra day to do it.”