Formula One news

BMW focussing on race setup

The BMW team had an experimental day in Malaysia on Friday, as drivers Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld finished the day in only seventeenth and twentieth places. Although the Swiss-German outfit appears to be struggling from the outset, the team's Friday results follow a similar pattern to those seen in Melbourne last week, where they went on to show a competitive performance in the Grand Prix.

Kubica led the charge in 17th position, but is condident that the results from practice do not in any way reflect the F1.09's race pace. "Today we concentrated totally on race preparation, and particularly on tyre comparisons," the Pole explained. "The specifications that Bridgestone have brought to Malaysia (Hard and Soft) are very different from the ones we used in Melbourne (Medium and Super Soft), and obviously Sepang also has different characteristics. In addition, the track temperatures were much higher here, so it was a new situation. We gathered a lot of data and have the basis to use the tyres to their full potential during the race; while we were doing long-runs today, we will be focussing on single lap performance tomorrow."

Although his team-mate was only three slots further on up on the day's results table, the name 'N. Heidfeld' certainly stood out alongside P20 in the final classification of second practice. "Certainly the results don't look good, but in Melbourne it was a similar picture on Friday," Nick reminded journalists. "Nevertheless, we do have some work to do in order to improve the balance of the car. In the first session I was running with KERS, but not in the second; using it makes a huge difference to the car's balance, but without it there is the loss of the boost - this was the experience we wanted, and why we took it out for the second session. Now we will throw everything into the mix such as lap times, data and my feelings, and then decide whether or not to use KERS here."

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