Australian GP: Williams Race Review
By Williams F1 Team
March 27 2011
The AT&T Williams Team looks back at the 2011 Australian Grand Prix, a race that saw a double DNF for the team.
| Williams Australian GP Race Review |
| Mechanical failures on both AT&T Williams race cars retired Rubens Barrichello and Pastor Maldonado from today’s opening Grand Prix in Australia. Prior to retiring on lap 48, Rubens showed a competitive race pace, demonstrating the potential of the FW33 in the opening Grand Prix of the season. A promising first weekend in Formula One for Pastor was cut short on lap nine of today’s race; his retirement concluding a solid start and some combative overtaking manoeuvres. |
Rubens Barrichello:
![]() "It was a tough race for us. I was pushed out a little bit at the start, but then I had a good rhythm going and was doing quite a lot of overtaking until the incident with Rosberg. I wasn’t planning on overtaking him at that point, I was defending from Kobayashi. I think we have one tyre with grip and one with less and so we have different braking points. Rosberg braked earlier, and was already in the middle of the corner before I could stop the car. The ‘33’ was competitive today, which is positive going into the next race." |
Pastor Maldonado: "We
don’t know exactly what happened with the car; we will have to look into
the problem with our engineers. There was no warning, we just stopped
and that was it for us. The start was great though. There were some big
moments going into the first two corners, but I came through them ok. I
was then getting settled into the race, everything was feeling ok in the
car, I felt good and then it went. I’ll now just look forward to getting
back out there again in Malaysia."
|
Sam Michael
Technical Director WilliamsF1: "After
problems with the sector settings on the moveable rear wing, Rubens’
FW33 had a strong opening pace and he was progressing well through the
field, setting competitive lap times. We then had a slow leak on the
front tyre so we stopped to avoid a failure. Rubens made a good recovery
and was making progress when he came together with Rosberg’s Mercedes
and the front wing failed. We chose to continue in order to gather data
on the tyres and KERS.Towards the end of the race, Rubens retired with a suspected transmission issue. We had a transmission failure on Pastor’s car early on in the race, we are currently investigating both problems. We take away quite a lot of data from this weekend." |
|
Albert Park, Melbourne |
Weather: Blue Skies | |||
|
POS |
DRIVER |
TEAM |
Time (Fastest Lap) |
Grid |
|
1 |
S Vettel |
Ferrari |
1:29:30.259 (1:29.844, 4th) |
1 |
|
2 |
L Hamilton |
McLaren |
+22.297 (1:30.314, 8th) |
2 |
|
3 |
V Petrov |
Lotus Renault |
+30.560 (1:30.064, 7th) |
6 |
|
DNF |
R BARRICHELLO |
AT&T Williams |
n/a (1:31.404, 12th) |
17 |
|
DNF |
P MALDONADO |
AT&T Williams |
n/a (1:34.102, 18th) |
15 |
![]() |
Australian GP: Williams Race Review
Posted by: Williams F1 (IP Logged)
Date: 27/03/2011 12:21
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"We
don’t know exactly what happened with the car; we will have to look into
the problem with our engineers. There was no warning, we just stopped
and that was it for us. The start was great though. There were some big
moments going into the first two corners, but I came through them ok. I
was then getting settled into the race, everything was feeling ok in the
car, I felt good and then it went. I’ll now just look forward to getting
back out there again in Malaysia."
"After
problems with the sector settings on the moveable rear wing, Rubens’
FW33 had a strong opening pace and he was progressing well through the
field, setting competitive lap times. We then had a slow leak on the
front tyre so we stopped to avoid a failure. Rubens made a good recovery
and was making progress when he came together with Rosberg’s Mercedes
and the front wing failed. We chose to continue in order to gather data
on the tyres and KERS.