The Williams team scored their first point of 2010 in Bahrain thanks to a tenth place finish from Rubens Barrichello.
The Brazilian’s new teammate Nico Hulkenberg sustained early damage at the beginning of the race thanks to a spin, which compromised his performance for the remaining 40-odd laps. However, the German did finish his first ever grand prix, albeit in an unspectacular fourteenth place.
Barrichello thought he should have done better than scoring just one point, and knows the team must improve. “It's good to have a point, but in all honesty, we thought that we would do a little better when we arrived here. So it's really all down to us, we can see that the competition is pretty fierce and there were no retirements among the leading cars. I think we finished around about where we deserved so it will be up to us to close up the gap.”
Hulkenberg had a tricky day nursing a sick car around the Sakhir circuit. “It was a tough and difficult debut for me today. Right from the start, I had to take some evasive action to avoid a crash in turn 2, which dropped me couple of places and a few laps later, I spun at turn 6. I am still not really sure how it happened, initially I thought there was something broken on the car, but it was not the case. I jumped the kerbs and maybe hurt the car a bit, as it was quite difficult to drive for the rest of what was a long and lonely afternoon for me. It's been a tough weekend, but the practice and long run pace has been good and we need to build on that.”
Technical Director Sam Michael was pleased with the reliability of the two cars, and is looking for improvements in performance for Australia.” It was today good to get both cars to the finish and one car in the points. Cosworth will also be happy with engine reliability after all their hard work over the winter. We went for a different strategy with Rubens on the prime tyre, but it looks like the option was quite strong. Nico had car damage after an early spin, so he spent the race learning about the tyres. We are looking forward to Melbourne and taking a step up in performance.”
