French GP Free Practice

Posted on Friday 20 Jun 2008 and tagged with france.

The AT&T Williams team had a productive day of free practice at the Circuit de Nevers in Magny-Cours today. Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima concentrated on set-up work of their FW30s ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying round and in preparation for Sunday’s French Grand Prix. Both drivers enjoyed uninterrupted running under moderate conditions at the French track.

Nico Rosberg:
We made a lot of progress today which is satisfying. We made quite a few changes to the car over the course of this morning’s session because I had some slight oversteer but, once we’d made those adjustments, things started to improve and we were fairly competitive in the afternoon. Performance-wise, we can be pretty happy with where we are at the moment. Obviously, my race strategy is a lot more important here than normal, so I might have to compromise my pace in tomorrow’s qualifying to account for that.

Kazuki Nakajima:
It was a bit of a difficult day for me. We struggled a little with the grip levels but we tried many different set-up options to solve the problem and it finally started to go our way towards the end of the sessions. I think track conditions will be better tomorrow so hopefully qualifying will go ok for us.

Patrick Head, Director of Engineering:
It was a day of homework with both drivers working through their scheduled set-up programmes. We have a lot of data to go through now to make decisions for, firstly, getting good qualifying positions and then for the race. Obviously for Nico, with his ten place grid penalty from the incident in Montreal, it’s going to be quite a hard race on Sunday.

Practice Results

Top Three Drivers

Position	Driver & Lap Time (Session 1)	Driver & Lap Time (Session 2)
1	F Massa 1:15.306	F Alonso 1:15.778
2	L Hamilton 1:16.002	F Massa 1:15.854
3	H Kovalainen 1:16.055	K Raikkonen 1:15.999

AT&T Williams Classification

Driver	Chassis & Engine	1st Session Laptime	2nd Session Laptime
N Rosberg	FW30-05 H307	1:17.394 (14th) 30 laps	1:16.682 (11th) 42 laps
K Nakajima	FW30-04 H308	1:17.696 (17th) 25 laps	1:17.002 (14th) 32 laps