Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Massa confident in planned Williams upgrade

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Felipe Massa says he thinks Williams can make a big step forward with new parts scheduled for the coming races.

Williams’ head of vehicle performance Rob Smedley revealed after the Monaco Grand Prix there would be a number of updates for the FW37 in both Canada and Austria. With the new parts scheduled to be implemented over two races, Massa is confident the second race will allow the team to display a clear improvement in performance.

“I don’t know how many new pieces we are going to have for Canada but for sure for Austria we should have quite a big step,” Massa said. “We’ll wait and see but I really believe it can be a good step for our car, maybe it can even be the biggest step we did up to now in the season. I’m sure lots of people brought a lot of new pieces for Barcelona and we couldn’t, so maybe our race is coming a little bit later so it should be between Canada and Austria.”

And Massa says the upgrades are well timed following a disappointing weekend for Williams in Monaco which yielded no points.

“I’m very confident for Canada, very confident for Austria, even for Silverstone. I think we’re going to good tracks for us so I’m sure we can forget what’s happened [in Monaco] and I think we can be even stronger at these tracks maybe compared to what we’ve been doing until now.

“I think we can be in good shape in Canada and Austria, but I also believe we can also make a step forward in these races with the car itself so we will wait and see.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.