Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Teams catching up with development in Bahrain

Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds believes teams will be in a more comfortable position in terms of updates and spare parts in Bahrain.

The 2016 season was originally set to start in Australia in April as part of a move to condense the calendar even further. Eventually the first race was confirmed for March 20, bringing pre-season testing forward by two weeks as well in the process.

Symonds believes a number of teams will not have had new parts on their cars in Australia due to the date change but should be catching up from this weekend’s race in Bahrain.

”I think a lot of people haven’t realised the significance moving [Melbourne] forward two weeks,” Symonds said. “Because designing a Formula 1 car is quite a long project, so you start it off with the date in mind and the first test was the beginning of March and we’d be racing at the end of March, that’s what we thought we were looking at.

“When it came forward two weeks we were well into the project, you can’t suddenly just invent two weeks from nowhere. I honestly think that everyone is behind where they want to be… There’ll be people who they’ve got stuff that’s come through the tunnel a little bit late and they haven’t got it on the cars.

“We’ve certainly got parts that we will have in Bahrain and China, I’m not sure exactly when, but yeah I’d love to have [had them in Melbourne] because there’s performance.”

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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.