FP1 & FP2 - Abu Dhabi GP report: Williams Mercedes

Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering

Everything went according to plan. We were doing some development work for next year’s car as well as the work for this weekend on the tyres and the set-up. We need to find a bit of time on both the low and high fuel, looking at where we were today, but we’ve got a lot to go through from today so that shouldn’t be a big deal. If we can find that bit of time, we can be towards the front.

Valtteri Bottas

It was a normal Friday, going through our set-up tests with both cars. We got all the results we wanted but we are a little behind our performance goals, so we’re trying to find something for better lap times tomorrow.

Felipe Massa

I expected a little bit better. We didn’t improve so much from the soft tyre to the super soft, compared to some other cars, so this is the point we need to make better tomorrow. Also, the tyres were not 100% ready for the first lap on the super soft. I don’t think these are big problems to understand, so I hope everything can work well tomorrow.