Williams spent much of their Friday in Barcelona evaluating the vast array of aero parts they have brought to the circuit this weekend in addition to testing the new Pirelli hard tyre and the usual race preparations.
Their progress appeared slightly hampered this morning after Pastor Maldonado crashed his FW33 at Turn 13. However, he neglected to mention this incident in his post-practice comments.
“I think today was good overall,” he said. “We completed our full testing programme which I'm happy about and we also did a few longer runs in FP2. It's difficult to compare ourselves to other teams as we don't know what they were doing, but everything seems to be going well. We have a number of upgrades but we still need time to analyse the data.”
Maldonado finished the day sixteenth fastest time, with his best lap exactly three tenths of a second slower than that of team-mate Rubens Barrichello. The Brazilian does not sound particularly confident about his car set-up yet, and anticipates a busy day for his pit crew on Sunday.
“We have tested all the new parts we have in Barcelona,” explained Barrichello. “On track, the rear wing looked alright but we need to look closer at how the new floor performed. It was very hot today so the grip level was lower and therefore the car was sliding more and tyre wear was greater.
“The car was oversteering a bit as well. I think we need to look at this for the weekend to try to minimise the problems and maximise our set-up, but I think at this stage we'd be looking at four stops minimum in the race on Sunday.”
“We went through all of our programme today which included running the new aero parts on both cars at various stages,” added Technical Director Sam Michael. “We have plenty of data to look at tonight to finalise the specification that we’ll race this weekend. Some parts of the floor are certainly on the limit, so we’ll take that into consideration. We didn’t have any reliability issues today.”
