25/07/2004
NEWS STORY
In a very exciting and eventful race, the BMW WilliamsF1 Team today secured six Championship points thanks to Juan Pablo Montoya's fifth place and Antonio Pizzonia's seventh position, his best Grand Prix finish to date.
Juan Pablo Montoya: What a bad start I had! The clutch didn't bite soon enough on the start and then I just had so much wheel spin and the car didn't go anywhere. I had no grip at all and lost a cool five positions. I also had some blistering problems on my rear tyres and it came to the point where driving the car was very, very hard since it was pointy and unpredictable. Actually, this prevented me from catching David Coulthard in the last part of the race. I came very close to him, but then I didn't feel I could make it. I am, of course, a bit disappointed because when you start from second you expect a podium finish. We did score some points today though which is very important for the team.
Antonio Pizzonia: All in all I'm happy with my performance today although I got stuck in a lot of traffic during the first two stints which cost me a lot of time. When I was on my own, I could put in some quick lap times but it wasn't enough to catch Webber in the last few laps. I still scored two points so I'm happy I could do that for the team. I think the potential is there, I just need some more race experience. After all, I drove my last Grand Prix more than one year ago.
Sam Michael (Technical Director WilliamsF1): It is good having scored points with both cars and it is nice to see Antonio picking up some points as well. We had a poor start on both cars so for the next race we will be looking to make improvements on this. In general, the cars performed better in this Grand Prix, so the latest car developments have demonstrably improved our performance. The pit-stops were good once again and helped the strategies work.
Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director): The first compliment has to go to Michael Schumacher who dominated this race. The second goes to the Hockenheim circuit. The track layout encourages overtaking and today we saw a lot of interesting duals. With regards to our race result today, it doesn't mirror our increased competitiveness, which we saw in yesterday's qualifying. Antonio drove a good race but Juan Pablo made a poor start. He later managed to climb through the field to finish in fifth, despite struggling with some blistering on the tyres which didn't help when he was trying to overtake the cars in front.