Bahrain GP: Difficult Friday for Atlassian Williams F1 Team

Paul Williams - Chief Engineer, Trackside Performance:
"Coming into this weekend, we knew it was going to be a challenge and was going to stretch the capabilities of the upgraded package, but we’ve had two clean sessions to gather data and we’re already finding some useful data points for us to dig into further. We knew that Baku was a stronger circuit for us, so it’s important that we can test out the package and the known limitations of the car around a circuit that exposes these weaknesses, ensuring we’re isolating these characteristics and not carrying them into next year.

The high tyre degradation from the rough track surface and high track temperature will dominate the race. It is also important to achieve a balance front and rear tyre preparation on low fuel. We’ll review the data tonight to prepare heading into FP3 and qualifying tomorrow."

Carlos Sainz:
"Very difficult Friday for us. Unfortunately, we see that on this track we are back to performing at the level that we were, towards the end of the grid, unless we find something extraordinary going into the weekend. We did some setup changes that helped in FP2, but we continue to struggle at high speed, long corners which also affects our degradation on such a rough tarmac. We’ll keep working on solutions for tomorrow and Sunday."

Alex Albon:
"This is such a unique track and it's really physical to drive. The car doesn't feel great yet, so we've got a lot of work to do overnight. We made some changes ahead of FP2 to improve our low speed, but we lost a bit of the medium and high speed, which had actually felt better than expected. Hopefully we get some rain or something unpredictable this weekend that we can take advantage of."