Belgian GP Race

Posted on Sunday 30 Aug 2009 and tagged with Belgium, race.

It was a hard fought weekend for a solitary point, but the AT&T Williams team stuck to their task with dedication after a difficult start to the race meeting on Friday. Significant engineering work on Friday night and a committed qualifying performance from Nico Rosberg enabled the team to stay in contention for a points finish in a race that saw many fancied runners falling by the wayside. The team’s focus will be on technical solutions to improve low drag performance for the circuit characteristics at Monza, the venue for the Italian Grand Prix in a fortnight, in order to build on an unbroken eight race run of points finishes.

Nico Rosberg:
We got absolutely the maximum out of today and so I am not so unhappy with the result. Even though the car was not good at all on Friday, we moved it forward and had a reasonable qualifying. We built on this with a good start to the race and claimed another point finishing in 8th place. It is more than I could have hoped for at the beginning of the weekend. The car was difficult to drive today and it had a lot to do with the tyres. When the sun came out, the tyres worked well, especially the soft tyres in the final stint. In these conditions, I was able to push more.

Kazuki Nakajima:
We struggled with our pace throughout the whole weekend here and qualifying was especially tough, which of course affected our potential in the race. On balance, the race was slightly better than Saturday, but of course all of our attention will now be on what we can do to be sure of an improved result in Italy in two weeks time.

Sam Michael, Technical Director:
This wasn’t a competitive race for us, but at least we scored a point and Nico fought well for his position. We were competitive at various points today but not over the race distance. What is clear is that on the low drag tracks we are not as competitive as on the normal high downforce circuits and we have a similar race in two weeks time, so we will be putting some energy towards being able to score more points in Italy.