German GP Free Practice

Posted on Friday 18 Jul 2008 and tagged with germany.

The AT&T Williams team had a workmanlike day of practice at the Hockenheimring in Germany today, aside from a misfire which cost Kazuki Nakajima some track time in the afternoon session. On his familiar home circuit, Nico Rosberg ran comfortably inside the top seven all day, with Kazuki’s best of the day recorded in the morning session which he concluded in P9.

Nico Rosberg:
During the pre-race test here last week, we have some mechanical updates to make our aero package work more effectively. This circuit definitely suits us a bit better, so we can look forward to a better weekend than recently. Out on the track today it was pretty windy and on the straights I was being buffeted from side to side. However, we managed a good tyre test even though our decisions may change with the rain we are expecting. If the bad weather does come, it’s no problem as we seem to go well in the rain.

Kazuki Nakajima:
The morning practice didn’t go too badly and we had both wet and dry running, which is good preparation for the weather we are likely to see here. However it wasn’t a great afternoon as we lost quite a lot of time with a problem on the car. By the time we had fixed this, everybody out on track had moved on to doing their long runs and it was very difficult to find free space on the circuit, so it was difficult to see exactly where we ended the day.

Sam Michael, Technical Director:
It was a fairly standard day on Nico’s car. On Kazuki’s car we had a misfire in the afternoon session. We changed quite a few parts and we believe we have got to the bottom of it, so it shouldn’t happen again. Now it is just a matter of looking at the data tonight to get ready for qualifying tomorrow.

Practice Results

Top Three Drivers

Position	Driver & Lap Time (Session 1)	Driver & Lap Time (Session 2)
1	L Hamilton 1:15.537	L Hamilton 1:15.025
2	H Kovalainen 1:15.666	F Massa 1:15.722
3	F Massa 1:15.796	K Raikkonen 1:15.760

AT&T Williams Classification

Driver	Chassis & Engine	1st Session Laptime	2nd Session Laptime
N Rosberg	FW30-05/H322	1:16.606 (6th) 27 Laps	1:16.355 (7th) 41 Laps
K Nakajima	FW30-04/H323	1:16.821 (9th) 26 Laps	1:16.829 (17th) 21 Laps