Williams F1

Before leaving for Singapore on Tuesday of last week, I spent a couple of days working on ways in which to improve AT&T Williams’ trackside data analysis. My efforts proved fruitful because I flew to the Far East armed with a new programme in Exel and VB (visual basic) that was to help us at the Marina Bay circuit.

We landed in Singapore on Wednesday (23rd) evening and went straight to the hotel. We couldn’t go to the track because the guys hadn’t finished setting up the pit garage, so we headed out on the town. Singapore is a fantastic city and we found a fun place to have an extended dinner and a few beers, all in aid of keeping us awake until 0600 because we wanted to remain on European time for the race weekend.

Without the slightest tinge of a headache, we headed into the track on Thursday afternoon to prepare for the race weekend. We had various meetings chaired by our chief operations engineer Rod Nelson and we looked through the pre-event summary that I’d prepared using data from last year. The cars have changed a lot from last year to this, but we expected the lap times to be similar and that made the ’08 data relevant.

At 2100 on Thursday evening I joined Nico [Rosberg] and Tony [Ross, Nico’s race engineer] on a track walk. We do this at every race, but we were later than intended because Nico had been in the FIA press conference at 1800. The track walk was a good opportunity to catch up with Nico; we discussed the last race at Monza – that bit didn’t take long! – and we went through the aerodynamic developments on the FW31 at this race.

There were a couple of meetings after that, one of which was a pre-briefing in which we discussed the on-track programme for Friday, and I then set off to run two laps of the track at midnight. I run every track and this was one of the hardest of the year so far, due to the 30-degree heat and 75 percent humidity.

Friday proved to be quite a tricky day because the track was really dusty during P1, which made it difficult to judge the performance of the car. Nico used just one set of tyres for the whole 1.5-hour session because grip levels were changing so much, and I then set about applying my new data analysis programme to the information we’d gathered and sharing the results with Tony and Nico.

As is the case at every race, I also gave Nico some telemetry overlays to show him how his laps during the session compared to Kazuki [Nakajima]. I don’t try and tell him how to drive; I just point out the biggest discrepancies.

The track became more representative during Friday’s second session, which allowed us to do some long runs on both tyre compounds. We also did some weight distribution tests, which resulted in us moving the ballast slightly rearwards. At the end of the session I went through the data and looked specifically at aero loads, tyre temperatures and how the set-up changes that we’d made had affected car performance. There were then lots of meetings to discuss the data that I’d collated and we planned what we were going to do during Saturday morning’s final practice session.

Our pace looked good on Saturday morning, so we were confident of a top five position in qualifying. As it was, Nico surprised everyone in Q2 by setting a blistering time to top the time sheets. He lapped 0.5s faster than anyone else and then came on the radio to say: “I don’t think I need to go out again.”

Q3 was red flagged with just one minute to go, forcing Nico to abort his final lap. He was flying and I’m confident that he would have got Vettel for second had he been able to complete the lap. As it was, he had to settle for third.

On raceday I arrived at the track at 1400 and my first job was to analyse data to ensure that Nico wasn’t losing time at the pitlane entry or exit. He’d been spot on during practice, so I didn’t need to have a long conversation with him about it – and we never even mentioned the white line at the pit exit. After all, he knows the rule as well as us.

And who can be angry with the guy for making a mistake? It was frustrating because I’m sure he was good for second place had that mishap on lap 18 not occurred, but you can’t be angry with him.

The post-race debrief was a subdued affair as a result, but I still had 1G of data to analyse and my usual post-race performance report to write and send out. At 0415 on Monday I then headed to Changi airport because I was about to spend a couple of days in Vietnam, before travelling to Japan on Wednesday.

Let’s hope we get a better result at Suzuka.