F1 News, Reports and Race Results

Williams adds filming day to schedule to gain mileage

Williams will be up and running on Friday in Barcelona, the team conducting a filming day at the Circuit de Catalunya to add more mileage to its belated FW42.

Williams' start to its pre-season testing programme was aborted earlier this week because of a build-up delay of its 2019 car.

The Grove-based outfit eventually joined in on the action on Wednesday afternoon, two and a half days after its rivals and therefore missing a massive amount of testing mileage.

The team's FW42 will run on Friday according to F1's 'Filming Day' rules, with a limit of 100 kilometers and on specific promotional tyres.

On yesterday's final day of running for the week, Robert Kubica and George Russell achieved a combined 65 laps, most of which were devoted to aero evaluations.

In the afternoon, Russell ran the car in its normal spec and offered a positive assessment of the FW42 although he refrained from exploring any limits.

"It felt quite nice to be honest, it felt stable, and I had a good feeling from it," said the Williams rookie.

"At the moment I’m not fully on the limit, I still don’t know the limits of the car. I’m not going balls-out attack to know where that is yet.

"Until I fully wring everything out of it it’s going to be difficult to know where we’re at and the full limitations or where we need to improve," he added.

"It was very important to get some mileage under our belt, and just get a feel for the car really.

"Although I’ve only done about 11 proper laps with the car it still gives us a good understanding of where we’re at, the limitations, and what we need to work on for next week."

Williams won't be the only team tagging on more laps on Friday as McLaren and Racing Point - who did not conduct filming days prior to the start of pre-season testing - will also take to the track for some limited mileage.

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Michael Delaney

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