Sam Michael: Williams yet to show new car’s true pace – Formula 1 news
Team Williams’ technical director Sam Michael has said that his team’s new car FW33 was unable to show its true pace at the season opening race in Australia.
“The competitiveness of the FW33 was encouraging given the limited running and set-up time we had in Melbourne. There is more to come from the car and I hope in the next few races we can show what the FW33 is capable of,” he said.
The car was quicker than it was back during the pre-season testing period but the team failed to deliver a good performance and put the pace of the new Williams to its true potential.
Other than that, since Rubens Barrichello, the team’s lead driver made a mistake during the qualifying session of the Australian Grand Prix and retired due to some gearbox problems during the race, the team failed to score as much points as it was expecting.
However, the team’s technical director is confident that the team will recover and give a much better performance comparatively at the Malaysian Grand Prix that is expected to commence in two weeks’ time.
“Heading to Sepang we will once again be hoping to get into the top ten in qualifying and end the weekend with some points for both cars,” said Michael.
According to the car’s new chassis, one of the features of the new FW33 is that it has a tightly packaged rear end that features an ultra slim-line gearbox casing.
Nevertheless, it was the gearbox because of which Rubens had to retire out of the Australian Grand Prix and therefore, the team will have to look into it in order to make the car more reliable before the second race of the 2011 Formula 1 season.
“We had transmission failures on both the cars this weekend. We are still currently investigating both problems,” Sam confirmed.
Barrichello faced a gearbox oil leak during the final free practice session this past Saturday before the qualifying session as well but Michael confirmed that both of the issues were unrelated.
As a result, both of the Williams drivers were unable to secure a single point at the season opening race and this is not the start team Williams was looking for.
On the other hand, Mercedes GP also had a similar start as both of their drivers were unable to finish the race as well even though they were hoping to challenge the top running teams for the podium at the Australian Grand Prix.
This means that the results are still quite unpredictable and it would be interesting to see how each team plans the Malaysian Grand Prix as the race strategies mattered a lot at the Australian Grand Prix as well.
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