Williams drivers Pastor Maldonado and Valtteri Bottas are both confident their Melbourne-spec package has delivered the required improvement after they tested it for the first time today in Barcelona.
Maldonado mainly concentrated on system checks with the new bodywork fitted to the car and still managed to clock the fourth fastest lap time of the day, a source for optimism for the Venezuelan.
“We were running quite a few new parts this morning so our focus was on learning more about them and how they make the car behave. It felt very different, but it’s too early to say how much performance gain they will bring. We have some good data for the engineers to analyse now, so we will see. I was able to do a good time despite the limited running which shows that we are still improving.”
Bottas took over for the afternoon and was also impressed by the updates and looks forward to exploiting the performance it delivers.
“I could really feel the difference today running the updated bodywork. We saw some improvements immediately but we still need to work on the car balance to maximise the potential. Overall, we learnt a lot and it’s nice to see the work everyone has been doing at the factory having a positive influence on the car. It’s now up to us to get the lap time out of it.”
