06/04/2008
NEWS STORY
The AT&T Williams team collected a point for its efforts in the Bahrain Grand Prix today with Nico Rosberg finishing on par with his eighth place grid position. Kazuki Nakajima's ambitions were hampered by a start problem and an early spin which demoted him to the back of the field, from where he fought back to 14th but an uneventful race with a high rate of finishers and clean execution of strategies meant there was little opportunity to gain ground. The team demonstrated 100% reliability through all the practice and qualifying sessions, but needs to improve its pace to build from its fourth position in the Championship.
Nico Rosberg: In the final analysis I guess I should go home happy as we got a point, but I don't feel satisfied. We should have done better. However it was very difficult out there, the tyre performance was very changeable and the wind conditions were different to Friday when we set our gear ratios and in the end the car was just not good enough. So we have got some work to do before the Spanish GP. Historically Barcelona is a difficult track for us, but we have got some new developments for the car, so I hope this will help for the next race.
Kazuki Nakajima: It was not an easy day for me, I had a very bad start and then I had a spin on the oil on lap two before the high speed esses, so it couldn't have begun any worse. After that I managed to keep up a consistent pace, but it was difficult to make any more progress through the field than up to P14 from the back. I will see what lessons we can learn from here for the next race in Barcelona.
Sam Michael, Technical Director: It's good to come away from the weekend with a point, but clearly we hoped to be fighting for more. On Nico's car, we weren't strong enough in the first stint and we made it difficult for ourselves with our strategy after we didn't qualify well enough. Unfortunately on Kazuki's car, the anti-stall kicked in on the start which dropped him to the back of the field and then he had a spin on the second lap, otherwise he probably should have made more progress on his one-stop strategy. Everything was solid today from a reliability point of view, but we do need to find more performance.