10/10/2008
NEWS STORY
Clear conditions in the region today allowed Mount Fuji to provide a stunning back-drop for Formula One's practice sessions in advance of Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix. In only the second visit to the prefecture for the sport, AT&T Williams carried out the usual set-up work on Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima's FW30s. On his Fuji debut in a Formula One car, Kazuki finished both sessions in the top ten in front of his home crowd, while Nico concluded the morning in P12 and the afternoon in P13.
Kazuki Nakajima: It was a pretty good day for me. There wasn't much grip at the start of the morning session so I was struggling a bit with the car, but that was possibly due to the amount of fuel we were carrying. The car started to feel better towards the end of the morning and then felt much better in the afternoon on new tyres. We've tried out various set-ups today, which proved positive. The gap to the other cars is still very close though so we need to be a bit careful and plan well for qualifying. We'll have to see how tomorrow goes, but it looks like we're on the right track.
Nico Rosberg: It's definitely going to be more difficult here than it was in Singapore for us. It was quite hard out there this morning in particular. We struggled with a slight lack of grip on the rear of the car and some oversteer, but we made good progress over the course of the two sessions and we ended this afternoon in a better position.
Sam Michael, Technical Director: We had a productive day of practice today during which we went through the typical set-up changes for a Friday and worked through the usual programme of tyre compares between the prime and options under race conditions. We'll now work on qualifying set-up overnight ahead of qualifying tomorrow. No reliability problems at all.