02/09/2005
NEWS STORY
Last week's test at the Italian track proved productive for the BMW WilliamsF1 Team whose drivers were in the top positions in both of today's free practice sessions. The team is now working hard to keep the momentum going for Saturday and Sunday.
Mark Webber: We had a pretty good day and we went through all of our programme. My car ran reliably and the mechanics and engineers did a good job in getting everything ready. We still have to work on our long distance pace because the balance still wasn't ideal this afternoon so we'll work on that in the practice sessions tomorrow. In the second session today we had the best track temperature to do the balance work for the race. We have a bit of work to do tonight but we are not looking too bad at all.
Nick Heidfeld: We can be quite happy with our positions today if we compare them to what we have achieved on Fridays in the last few races. Of course, it's only Friday but we hope Saturday and Sunday will be as good. In terms of our programme, we completed our usual work on the tyres and did some small changes on the set-up but obviously, like every other team, we got through the majority of our set-up work last week during the test here in Monza.
Sam Michael (Technical Director, WilliamsF1): It was a productive day for us. We got through our entire analysis programme. Obviously everybody is helped by last week's test here to check tyres, brakes and cooling. Nevertheless some final checks today were good and everything seems to be working well. Hopefully we can continue like this tomorrow. We have a couple of new aero parts here in addition to the usual Monza package and they are all working fine.
Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director): It was a good first practice day at the Autodromo and both the drivers went through their set up programmes without problems. The workload was not as huge as usual because Monza is the only circuit on which it is allowed to test in the week before the race because of the high speeds. Most of the teams took this opportunity and collected enormous amounts of data for the car set-up.