During an unusually cloudy day for Budapest, the BMW WilliamsF1 Team drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Antonio Pizzonia set the third and seventh fastest time respectively at the Hungaroring. The Brazilian is again deputising this weekend for injured Ralf Schumacher.

Juan Pablo Montoya: We have made good use of today’s practice and my lap time was okay by the end of the session. But there’s still quite a lot of work ahead of us, because we know there’s more in the car. The track was very dirty at the beginning of Free Practice and there was no grip at all, but conditions improved throughout the session and they were acceptable towards the end. However the balance of the FW26 wasn’t ideal under cornering and on the bumpy sections. We need now to address this and get the car in good shape for tomorrow.

Antonio Pizzonia: Today it has been a learning day for me, as it was my first time on this track in a F1 car and I basically spent my time learning the circuit. I am quite happy the way we went through our programme and the results show that it was a productive session. We have collected good data and tyre choice seems pretty clear to us, at the moment, even if we know the track is going to improve a lot. I am fairly pleased with my day but still I know there’s more to come from me. We will work hard with the engineers this afternoon and then I’ll go back to the hotel tonight and sleep on it and consider where I can still improve. I am sure tomorrow I’ll be even better prepared.

Sam Michael (Technical Director, WilliamsF1): We have gone through our normal programme with evaluation of tyres and brakes. The track was lot cleaner than in previous years due to the new vacuum cleaner used, but still low grip to start with. We also concentrated on the start procedure with both drivers. In conclusion, we have had a good first day here and all the new parts we have brought to the car are working well. Although it is always a bit risky to bring new parts straight to a race, we have had a lot of confidence in the wind tunnel correlation to the track which enables us to do this.

Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director): The first day of practice with the modified car ran positively smoothly and we made good use of our time. Now it is important that we also manage to set up the carduring the 90 minutes of tomorrow morning’s practice sessions. Also the improvement we have made during the shakedown in Silverstone in order to improve our starting procedure showed itself to work well today.