Williams F1 Bahrain Grand Prix Practice

Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: We completed our programme with two relatively minor issues; one on Lance’s car in FP1, which lost us his final run but was easily fixed, and a puncture on Lance’s car on his final run of FP2 cut that run short. Other than that, we ran a number of experiments across both sides of the garage with downforce levels, and some mechanical and aerodynamic changes. The drivers are not entirely unhappy with the car, but the pace is not where we need it to be. Particularly in FP2, we lost competitiveness – something we need to understand overnight in order to put ourselves in better shape for qualifying.

Lance Stroll: It’s been a tricky day in terms of where we are on the time sheets. There is a lot to improve on, that’s for sure. The car feels better than last year, but its’s still not where we want to be. Melbourne was a little bit better on Friday than the Friday we have experienced here in Bahrain, but it is another day tomorrow. We have a meeting tonight to discuss the car and where we can improve our pace, so hopefully we can get on top of things and come back better tomorrow. I think we can improve in many areas, so there is a lot that can be better. I think I could make my lap a tenth or two better than where it is, but still that is not enough as we need to be looking for big gains and not just minor details.

Sergey Sirotkin: It was quite a good session. I think we completed, learned and collected quite a lot of information. We also tried very different compounds for tomorrow on short and long runs, so I think it was a very productive session. That’s what we needed, some clean running which we can use later on in the year, so I think we have to be happy with today. I was on the hardest tyre for the first run. I think where we are is not too far off what we were expecting. The main thing is we’re not talking about results, we’re talking about the data and information we collected. In these terms, it was quite productive. Realistically, we have some things to work on, but I think we will improve a little bit, just the same as others will, so let’s see who does the better homework tonight.