17/10/2008
NEWS STORY
After three hours of intensive homework at the Shanghai circuit today, the AT&T Williams team completed much of the groundwork in preparation for tomorrow's Chinese Grand Prix qualifying session. While the routine tyre compares and other necessary preparatory work was undertaken, set-up changes and improving track conditions allowed both drivers to find over a second a lap from the start of the day to the close of play. Fine tuning will be the order of the third and final practice tomorrow, before the afternoon's allimportant qualifying session.
Nico Rosberg: I am broadly okay with how things went today as I remember how difficult we found it here with our car working the tyres last year, but this time round the tyres are performing well. That said, we are still not quick enough, but we have progressed the car well since this morning, working on the weight distribution which positively affected the balance, which in turn helped the tyres. We'll just have to wait and see how qualifying will shape up tomorrow.
Kazuki Nakajima: Today went quite alright in my view. We tried a couple of set-up directions and we improved steadily throughout the sessions, and learnt lots about the new tyre on this track. Although I didn't race here last year, the Friday practice time I had out on the circuit helped me get off to a good start.
Rod Nelson, Chief Operations Engineer: We ran through a normal Friday programme, with the morning focused on finding the balance on the car, while in the afternoon we did the tyre test, running the prime against the option, as well as some longer runs for race preparation. The circuit was fairly dusty off-line, which caught a few people out at turns 11 & 12, but we managed to avoid any problems. The cars ran reliably and as usual from here will look at the data in preparation for tomorrow.