MALAYSIAN GRAND PRIX - FREE PRACTICE
The AT&T Williams team completed a full programme of
preparatory work in today’s two practice sessions for
this Sunday’s Malaysian Grand Prix, interrupted only
by a problem with a clutch release bearing for Kazuki Nakajima
in the morning session, which was quickly rectified. With
a new asphalt surface at the Sepang Circuit, a wide variety
of setup options were tried and all-important tyre options
progressed ahead of a final hour of practice tomorrow morning.
Weather reports suggested a possibility of rain, but both
sessions were completed in the dry despite the humidity nudging
72% later in the afternoon.
Nico Rosberg: The track is quite different
here now because of the new asphalt, so in many ways I think
everyone is starting from zero. From our point of view, it
was a good step forward over Australia to get a full day of
track running today. Performance-wise, the car seems pretty
good straight out of the box here and I am pretty happy with
what we achieved. We tried plenty of things just to see what
was what, but the track ramped up a lot in the second session
in particular, so it will make the set-up call quite difficult,
but I am pretty satisfied with our work today.
Kazuki Nakajima: It was quite hot today!
Of course it was a shame to miss some track time this morning
with the problem we had, but nevertheless, I still managed
to record fifteen timed laps in the last 30 minutes of the
morning session, so I didn’t miss out on much. We still
have to address a few things on the car tomorrow in terms
of the set-up, but it improved throughout the second session
and towards the end of the 90 minutes, I was starting to find
a better balance.
Sam Michael, Technical Director: We had
a productive day’s running and ran through all of our
programme on both cars, checking cooling and the two different
tyres to decide how we will use them in the strategy on Sunday.
In the first session we had a clutch release bearing problem
on Kazuki’s car. The mechanics did a really good job
and turned this around quickly to minimise the time lost.
We’ll look at the data now and see what additional set-up
changes we will consider for tomorrow on top of those we tried
today.
SESSION 1 SESSION 2
AIR TEMP 28-30 0C 30-34 0C
TRACK TEMP 40-490C 39-570C
WEATHER Clear, sunny Broken cloud
TOP 3
F Massa 1:35.392
K Raikkonen 1:36.459
H Kovalainen 1:36.556
L Hamilton 1:35.055
F Massa 1:35.206
K Raikkonen 1:35.428
CHASSIS & ENGINE 1st SESSION 2nd SESSION
N ROSBERG FW30-03 / H257 1:36.578 (4th) 23 LAPS 1:36.908 (12th)
36 LAPS
K NAKAJIMA FW30-04 / H256 1:37.649 (12th) 18 LAPS 1:36.838
(10th) 34 LAPS
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