Williams Racing Senior Race Engineer Dave Robson shares his insight of the Hockenheim track as his team prepare the next chapter of their 2019 FIA Formula 1 World Championship recovery.
The Grove-based squad achieved their best result of the season last time out at Silverstone. George Russell came home in a career-best fourteenth and Robert Kubica behind in fifteenth.
Williams are still without a point this year though and with a long gap of nineteen points over their nearest competitors Haas F1 Team, it will take a drastic change of fortune to not see the British outfit prop up the Constructors’ Championship for the second season running.
“Hockenheim offers a challenging mix of corner types, some of which are especially quick,” Robson said. “As a result, teams typically run quite high downforce set-ups despite the straights.
“Braking can be reasonably tough with little opportunity to cool the brakes from Turn 11 to the end of the lap, and often a tailwind into Turn 2 & Turn 6. The track surface is normally quite smooth, and this can make warm-up of the tyres tricky in qualifying.
“Pirelli bring their C2, C3 & C4 compounds, which are the middle of their range, and one step softer than we used in Silverstone.”
On the plus side, Williams have managed their reliability very well by getting both cars to the chequered flag at every race so far in 2019.
Robson felt the items that were brought to Silverstone had helped the FW42’s performance during the race especially. He is looking forward to testing more components this weekend at Hockenheim in an attempt to boost team morale.
“We brought some test items to the car in Silverstone and were happy with their performance, which helped Robert and George achieve our best result of the season so far,” Robson added.
“We will continue to test further items over the coming races, including this weekend in Germany.”
