Spanish GP: Preview - Williams

21/04/2008

Formula One's European season opens this weekend with the 37th Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Catalunya, located to the north of Barcelona in Montmeló. Hosting the race for the 17th time, Catalunya is a favoured testing venue among the teams, and is a well known entity to the drivers who have all banked considerable mileage at the track over the winter.

Following its return from Bahrain, the AT&T Williams team and its drivers, Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima, have spent four days testing aero and mechanical updates at Barcelona and is well prepared for making the short journey to Spain again this week for round four of the FIA Formula One World Championship. Once the Williams-Toyota FW30s complete 26 laps of the Spanish Grand Prix, the team will celebrate the first of a series of landmarks this year having recorded 50,000 raced laps in Formula One since Williams Grand Prix Engineering's debut race in Argentina in 1978.

Nico Rosberg: I'm looking forward to this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix because we know the circuit well as we've done a lot of testing there in the past. The car performed well at Catalunya throughout winter testing, so it should run well in the race. We had a promising test there last week; I had two day's preparation time with the car which should stand us in good stead for the race. The only difficulty with Barcelona is that track conditions are constantly changing so you're frequently having to adjust your set-up. Malaysia is now firmly behind us and I'm hoping we'll come away from next weekend with a positive result.

Kazuki Nakajima: We have some aero updates on the car for Barcelona, which we spent last week testing, and they should bring us some gains performance-wise. Personally, I like the Circuit de Catalunya. I had a good result there when I raced in GP2 last year and I hope I can do well in my debut Spanish Grand Prix. My engineer, Xevi Pujolar, is from Spain, so it's technically going to be one of our home races, so I'm hoping I can get him a good result!

Sam Michael, Technical Director, Williams F1: Barcelona is a great test of aerodynamic efficiency, engine power and chassis balance. It tends to highlight a car's strengths and weaknesses, except perhaps the brakes because braking loads in Barcelona are fairly minimal compared to other tracks because there are numerous high speed corners with high lateral corner loads on entry and exit.

We have tested at Barcelona throughout the winter, and as recently as last week, during which time we've fine tuned set-up and brought some aerodynamic and mechanical developments to the car. Bridgestone will bring two tyres from the harder end of the compound range for this race and strategy tends to lean towards two stops because the high speed corners make a one stop option too difficult.
With the cars demonstrating good reliability now, our target for Barcelona is to continue improving our performance and getting points in order to build upon our position in the Constructors' Championship, but it will be a tough battle.