17/03/2006
NEWS STORY
A good start for the BMW Sauber F1 Team to the PETRONAS Malaysian Grand Prix in the sauna of Sepang. All three drivers ran well as we concentrated on tyre evaluation.
Jacques Villeneuve: It was a pretty good start for us today. To be honest, much better than I expected. The balance of the F1.06 was really good, which is very important so early in the weekend. I had a completely troublefree day and it was fun to drive with the high level of grip available.
Nick Heidfeld: Our first day of practice was fine, so I'm quite happy. This afternoon it wasn't necessary for me to do a lot of running, because the balance of the car felt good straight away. Sepang is a circuit I really enjoy, driving is so much fun here.
Robert Kubica: We gathered plenty of data today, especially this afternoon when we did some race simulation, and obviously that is the most important thing on a Friday. Sepang is quite a difficult circuit, with a lot of long corners with different lines, but I think after five laps I felt quite familiar with it.
Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director): This first practice day went as expected. Robert did 59 laps and most of the set-up work, and as in Bahrain he did a good job. The only problem we had all day was a slight glitch with the clutch as he was leaving the pits on his last stint this afternoon. We now need to make our tyre decision and to work on set-up for Saturday, and thanks to our reliability today we have plenty of data to enable us to optimise the cars.
Willy Rampf (Technical Director Chassis): Today we concentrated completely on tyre evaluation. Robert was doing the long-runs, so we were able to collect a lot of data which we now have to analyse in order to make the best decision for qualifying and the race.