Rod Nelson says there can be “hysterical” reactions when reading too much into the first lap times set in pre-season testing, but the Williams chief test and support engineer expects a clearer picture to emerge next week.
With half of this year’s winter practice already in the books, the season of guesswork has already started in order to try and define the 2016 pecking order.
With 377 laps in the opening group session, Williams places fourth in terms of mileage, with Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa logging the 14th and 21st quickest marks overall.
“I think we’re OK,” said Nelson. “During a day you kind of look at what everyone else is doing and you’re ‘Jesus they look quick!’ and then about 10 o’clock at night Pirelli tell us what tyres everyone else is running and you go ‘but he was on the ultrasoft, no problem’.
“You tend to have that hysterical thing where you go ‘wow!’ and there is massive excitement and then you just calm down a little bit. I think we’re doing OK.”
As the season-opening Australian Grand Prix gets nearer, teams will be keen to switch their focus from consolidating reliability to unlocking more raw performance out of their new challengers.
“We will get a much better picture next week because people will go into qualifying simulations,” Nelson added. “Everyone will be running the sticky tyres – the supersofts and the ultrasofts. A lot of people have not run them this week. Some teams were doing things that others weren’t, so it was a lot more nebulous.
“Mercedes clearly were looking at race distances putting massive mileage every day, some other teams were doing two- or three-lap runs and getting headline numbers.
“There’s a lot of homework to do between now and Melbourne. And since we have two thirds the amount of time we had last year, we have got to try and jam this amount of work in.”
The second and final pre-season test takes place at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya from March 1-4.
A closer look at the Williams FW38
Scene at the first pre-season test
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