Bahrain Grand Prix – Williams’ Robert Kubica says that some investigation work is required as his FW42 is handling differently to teammate George Russell’s.
Williams’ trials and tribulations aren’t yet finished at this point of the 2019 season. After their late start to testing and poor performance in Australia, they have brought back Sir Patrick Head as a consultant to the team – Head being one of the co-founders of the team along with Sir Frank Williams back in the 70s. Head, who has been away from Formula 1 since 2011, will be attempting to help right the ship at the beleaguered team.
However, with their problems very much still present, both drivers languished down the bottom of the pack again in Friday practice. By the end of FP2, George Russell was P19 and three seconds off the front-running pace on the Soft tyre, with Robert Kubica a further second behind.
Speaking afterwards, the Polish driver says there is a curious inconsistency across the two cars that needs to be investigated: “In Australia, I ran a different set-up to George and we could clearly see the different characteristics of the car, here we started with the same set-up and the characteristics are still different. I just hope we are able to solve it, but we have some tests to do so we understand the reasons.”
“It wasn’t an easy day, but we know what we need to work on.”
With the team admitting they are treating this portion of the season as testing, George Russell said that Bahrain might actually be somewhat flattering for the FW42: “I think we are very slightly closer, as the circuit generally suits the team more than others, but we are where we expected. FP1 was quite a challenge, however I think everybody was struggling out there in the hot conditions. FP2 was much nicer to drive but the laptimes are still a long way off and we have a lot of work to do. Whilst we are in this position we need to use it to optimise everything else so when the car does become competitive we are ready to pounce.”
