Williams F1

Kazuki's race engineer, Xevi Pujolar, takes over the Williams Blog this week in between travelling back and forth between Spain for work and play...

Being from Girona, near Barcelona, I go back to Spain on weekends when there isn’t a Grand Prix. That involves flying home on a Friday evening and then returning to the UK on Sunday evening to ensure that I’m in the office first thing Monday morning.

So I was in the office by 0900 last Monday and the first thing I did was reply to emails. I then looked through the set-up configurations that we ran at Valencia last year, so that I had an idea of what to do with the set-up of the FW31 at the European Grand Prix.

Mid-morning Monday, Kazuki arrived at the factory and we then worked through the set-ups I’d chosen on the simulator. This was the first time that I’d seen Kazuki since the Hungarian Grand Prix, so it was good to catch up with him again. He did about 80 laps on the simulator and by the end of the day we’d picked two set-ups with which to work in more detail.

On Tuesday morning all of the trackside engineers had a meeting with our Chief Operations Engineer, Rod Nelson, in which we discussed our plans for Valencia. We compared the proposed programmes for our two cars and analysed how the new aerodynamic parts on the FW31 would affect performance. Then I was back on the simulator with Kazuki to help him do some qualifying simulations of Valencia. After we’d done that, we looked through the data so that he was 100 percent ready to hit the track during practice on Friday morning.

The race team flew to Valencia on Wednesday, which meant meeting at the factory at 0730. We arrived in Valencia at 1600 and went straight to the Holiday Inn, where I did some more work. Being the only Spanish-speaker on the race team, I then became the team’s unofficial tour guide when it came to finding restaurants for the remainder of the weekend!

Thursday was the final preparation day before the off. The mechanics had job lists to follow and it was my job to ensure that Kazuki’s car was exactly as we wanted it prior to the start of first practice. We also had a Bridgestone meeting and at 1500 I did a track walk with Kazuki. We looked at the circuit in detail and took photographs of any changes from last year so that we could update the model on the simulator.

During the first on-track session on Friday, we confirmed the tests that we’d done in the simulator earlier in the week. We then got down to some tyre comparison work during the second session, before taking out a bit of fuel at the end of P2 to give Kazuki an idea of how the car felt on light fuel. Being a street track, grip levels kept changing as more rubber went down, which made it hard to make progress with the car.

Kazuki’s qualifying was ruined by a throttle problem, which forced him to park the car during Q1. It was the first time that we’d had this particular problem with the car, so I felt very sorry for him. If he’d had a clean run, I’m sure he could have made it into Q3 because he was driving well and the FW31 was quick.

Things didn’t get much better in the race either. We gave Kazuki a lot of fuel and he was up to 13th place when, on lap 39, he had a puncture. We don’t know what caused it, but it brought a frustrating weekend to a premature end.

With the Belgian Grand Prix taking place next weekend, we’re already back into the race week cycle. Kazuki and I are going through various set-ups on the simulator, ahead of travelling to Spa on Wednesday. Let’s hope we have a better weekend there.