British GP Free Practice

Posted on Friday 04 Jul 2008 and tagged with silverstone, britain.

It was a busy day of preparation work for AT&T Williams at Silverstone today. At the team’s home track, drivers Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima, having already benefited from a three day test here last week, continued their set-up work ahead of tomorrow’s qualifying and Sunday’s British Grand Prix. Neither session was without incident as this morning’s practice was interrupted for twenty minutes following Massa’s accident, while Kazuki cost himself time at the end of the afternoon after he hit the wall at turn 12 forcing himself out of the session prematurely.

Nico Rosberg:
After today, I think we can definitely say we had a productive test here last week as we seem to have made good progress. Our main objective for free practice was to focus on tyre comparisons and we seem to have collected some positive results from that. In terms of performance, we should be a step ahead of where we were in Magny-Cours, but we really will have to wait and see.

Kazuki Nakajima:
It was going fairly well before the accident. I lost the rear at the exit of turn 12 and just spun into the wall. It’s annoying to make such a mistake because it cost me important track time. We’d been having a good run before that, and making good progress for tomorrow, so I also apologise to the team. I will now just keep my head down and look ahead to qualifying.

Sam Michael, Technical Director:
We worked through our normal checks on tyres and also carried out some set-up tests after feedback from the test here last week. We didn’t experience any mechanical problems on the cars, but Kazuki unfortunately had an excursion in the second practice session and that meant he missed about twenty minutes of running. We now have some work to do overnight to be ready for qualifying tomorrow.

Practice Results

Top Three Drivers

Position	Driver & Lap Time (Session 1)	Driver & Lap Time (Session 2)
1	F Massa: 1:19.575	H Kovalainen: 1:19.989
2	H Kovalainen: 1:19.587	M Webber: 1:20.520
3	L Hamilton: 1:19.623	L Hamilton: 1:20.543

AT&T Williams Classification

Driver	Chassis & Engine	1st Session Laptime	2nd Session Laptime
N Rosberg	FW30-05/H328	1:20.744 (10th)	1:20.748 (5th)
K Nakajima	FW30-04/H323	1:21.282 (16th)	1:20.985 (9th)