Technical problems hinder Williams Friday practice in China

Valtteri Bottas: "We tried lots of things in FP1 and saw some positive results. In FP2 I had a problem at the start but the team did a great job to fix it in time for me to still complete three runs.

Valtteri Bottas, Williams FW35

Photo by: XPB Images

I feel we have moved a little bit forward since Malaysia, but we’ll see tomorrow where we are compared to the others in qualifying set-up. We need to work hard to maximise what we have here."

Pastor Maldonado: "We will see tomorrow in qualifying what steps we have made as it’s too early to say. The car felt like we had made some improvements during FP1, but we struggled this afternoon so we need to analyse the data to see how best to move forward."

Mike Coughlan, Technical Director: "We felt we had made some progress this morning, but we ended the day two seconds away from where we need to be. We lost some time at the start of FP2 on Valtteri’s car due to a problem with the throttle actuation system.

The team worked with Renault to fix it as quickly as possible to make sure Valtteri still had time this afternoon to get through some of the tyre work that we had planned.

Long run tyre degradation looks like it will make things difficult in the race, but we’ll look at the data tonight to see what we can do. We feel we are moving in the right direction but there is still a long way to go and we now need to bring performance."

Williams F1 Team