George Russell admitted that he was relieved to register over one hundred laps in what he described as the first “proper” day of testing for Williams.
Following the delays in the delivery of the FW42 to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, the Williams team only began testing their car part-way through the third day of testing.
With the team spending days three and four shaking down the car and learning the car, newcomer Russell was buoyed by the team completing over one hundred laps on the first day of the second test.
“It feels like a proper day one for us really,” said Russell. “It was great to get some laps on the car just to understand what the car’s doing at low fuel and high fuel, giving us an indication about what to do for the rest of the week.
“It’s a huge relief to get a day like today because we’ve learned so much about the car.”
“It certainly hasn’t made up for last week because everybody [else] at this stage is fine-tuning the balance, whereas we’re still needing to understand the car, so I feel like we’re in a good spot. The car isn’t in the perfect window right now, but I feel like it’s definitely got the potential and we’ve still got three good days to go at.”
Russell added that the main focus for the team was to focus on the longer race pace runs and that headline times will wait until the team have a better understanding of the softer tyres.
“It was really nice to push quite hard, I think we had some very good runs on the C3 and the C1 tyre. We have some work to do on the C4 and C5, but this is only normal. I think we’ve run those [softer] sets of tyres once, but we’ve got a good understanding of those.
“I think what was important is that we got laps. We had no issues.”
Robert Kubica will take over the FW42 for Wednesday’s running, before handing the car back to Russell on Thursday.
To view the full results from the first day of the second test, click here.
