Reliability issues dogged Williams' race in Australia as a double retirement brought a poor weekend to a close.
Rubens Barrichello and Pastor Maldonando were both pulled into the garage to retire their FW33s before the end of the race.
Technical Director Sam Michael was optimistic for the future in terms of the data that was collected but was disappointed with the mechanical failures which will be investigated post-race.
He said: “After problems with the sector settings on the moveable rear wing, Rubens' FW33 had a strong opening pace and he was progressing well through the field, setting competitive lap times.”
“We then had a slow leak on the front tyre so we stopped to avoid a failure. Rubens made a good recovery and was making progress when he came together with Rosberg's Mercedes and the front wing failed.”
“We chose to continue in order to gather data on the tyres and KERS. Towards the end of the race, Rubens retired with a suspected transmission issue.”
“We had a transmission failure on Pastor's car early on in the race, we are currently investigating both problems. We take away quite a lot of data from this weekend.”
Debutant Maldonado only made it nine laps in before being retired by the team but can't wait to get back out on track for another taste of F1.
He added: “We don't know exactly what happened with the car; we will have to look into the problem with our engineers. There was no warning, we just stopped and that was it for us.”
“The start was great though. There were some big moments going into the first two corners, but I came through them ok.”
“I was then getting settled into the race, everything was feeling ok in the car, I felt good and then it went. I'll now just look forward to getting back out there again in Malaysia.”
