Unfortunately for everyone, and especially the spectators, the weather conditions were very poor today with constant rain throughout both sessions.
As the forecast predicts both a wet qualifying and race we decided to run more than we would typically do in these challenging conditions in order to set the car up and get the drivers’ feedback ahead of the weekend. In FP2 Bruno aquaplaned off the circuit on full wet tyres damaging the front and rear wings and suspension. The mechanics are now busy rebuilding the car and we’ll be ready for FP3.
Bruno Senna: Unfortunately we didn’t have a very productive day in the end. The weather was poor weather with puddles on the track during second practice. On my second run, I aquaplaned on some deep water at the high speed Becketts section of the track and from that point was I a passenger until the car hit the wall. It was quite a heavy accident but I am ok. There is a lot of damage to the car but the Williams team will, I’m sure, do a great job of getting it back into shape for tomorrow.
Pastor Maldonado: We didn’t get chance to do a lot of running today but everybody is in the same situation. We didn’t try too many things with the set-up today but we used the time to see how the track conditions were. There was a lot of aquaplaning, but the car feels quite good despite not getting the chance to run on a wet set-up. If it’s like this all weekend, we’ll just need to make some decisions tomorrow ahead of qualifying.
Valtteri Bottas: It was really wet this morning with a lot of water running across the track, meaning that the tyres were aquaplaning a little bit. The conditions were not easy but I think it was good overall. We got a little bit of direction with the car balance as it is looking like there will be rain all weekend. We made the most of the chance we had today by doing a few flying laps, but the weather was just getting worse.
Source: Williams F1 Team / LAT Photographic
