Williams to run new floor in FP3

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Williams will run its new floor for the first time in final practice for the Hungarian Grand Prix after its arrival overnight.

The team confirmed during its pre-race preview that it would have a new floor in Hungary, but it was not ready in time for use during Friday practice. Head of performance engineering Rob Smedley says the new floor will run in FP3 this morning as Williams analyses the performance gain.

"We’ve got quite a big floor upgrade coming, so we’ll be testing that in FP3 and hopefully it moves us forward a little more," Smedley said. "We also completed a number of installation laps on the front wings to look at some very specific data collection. Aside from that we’ve stayed with the old specification, because we wanted to concentrate on the suspension work."

While McLaren was the fourth quickest team - occupying seventh and eighth in both Friday sessions - behind Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari, Smedley expects Williams to move up on Saturday.

"When we’ve had the car in the correct configuration we’ve been reasonable, especially on the long runs which were good, so that’s a definite positive for us. We’re still not quite where we need to be, but I think we’re back to our normal position behind the top three teams."

Valtteri Bottas will evaluate the new floor, with only one available. Bottas will race the update if it works as expected, with a second floor due in Germany next week for Felipe Massa's car.

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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.