Practice report

Williams quotes about Japanese GP Friday practice

Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer: We had a productive and extremely busy couple of sessions with the drivers running different programmes in Suzuka today.

Story Highlights

Aero evaluations
Tyre runs and set-up work
Longer runs in FP2

We successfully tested a number of new components and established a good base set-up for the remainder of the weekend.

Bruno Senna: It was an interesting day as we learn a lot of things about the testing we’ve been doing. Missing the morning session was difficult as we were fine tuning the car set-up to suit my driving style, but we had a clean session completing plenty of laps and so overall it was good experience.

Pastor Maldonado, Williams

Photo by: xpb.cc

Pastor Maldonado: We completed our programme today but we still have a lot of work to do. The car is looking consistent and our longer run pace was good.

We still need to find some more performance ahead of qualifying so we'll now work through all the data we have gathered.

Valtteri Bottas: Suzuka is a new track for me so it wasn’t an easy session and it took quite a few laps to get into the rhythm. In the first run, the car balance wasn’t ideal but we managed to improve the car for the second and third runs.

I was also improving myself throughout the session. I think I have a new favourite track as Suzuka is fantastic to drive. It's challenging and very quick which makes it great fun.