Practice report

Busy afternoon for Williams on Friday practice at Silverstone

Pastor Maldonado was doing mechanical tests, whilst Valtteri bottas did aero evaluations.

Mike Coughlan, Technical Director: It was raining this morning so we could only run on full wet tyres in FP1 to get a feel for the balance of the car.

Pastor Maldonado, Williams FW35

Photo by: XPB Images

Our test programme was therefore shifted to FP2, so we didn't run the prototype tyre as we needed time to get through all the changes we had planned.

Pastor was doing mechanical tests, whilst Valtteri did aero evaluations with two different packages we have here. We gathered all the information we needed so now we will analyse the data to decide which direction to go. Both cars will run with the same configuration tomorrow.

Valtteri Bottas: Conditions were not ideal today, especially as we were trying to test new parts on the car. It’s the same for all teams, but I really feel for the fans as they didn’t see much running.

We managed to test with both the prime and option tyres in the second practice session, so we’ll look at the data tonight and assess where we need to improve for the final practice session and qualifying tomorrow.

Pastor Maldonado: I was running a different programme to Valtteri today, concentrating on mechanical work and tyres. We lost a lot of track time in the first session due to the weather, so we had a busy afternoon.

I was also able to do a longer run towards the end as the track dried but we still have work to do to improve the performance for tomorrow.

Williams F1 Team