Formula One news
Michael: Temperatures no real influence
23 June 2009Sam Michael believes that the Williams team's performance was not affected by the cooler conditions of Silverstone at the weekend. As the Red Bull team excelled in the sub-twenty degree air temperatures, the Brawn cars did the opposite although Williams' technical director is not convinced that the variable environment changes had any major effect on the performances of Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima.
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| The sun finally came out on Sunday, as Nico Rosberg discovered |
With track temperatures in Northamptonshire reaching highs of only the early 20's for the duration of the weekend, conditions at Silverstone very much matched those of pre-season testing in Spain. As Red Bull pulled away dominantly from the first green light in practice to the chequered flag in the race, championship leaders Brawn struggled somewhat to match the pace of the men at the sharp end.
For Williams, Nico Rosberg scored the team's second consecutive top five finish. "For us, the temperatures at Silverstone didn't have any real influence on our race," explained Australian Michael, who joined the team in 2001. "We would have preferred to have run the Hard tyre throughout, but there wasn't a massive difference between the two."
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| Nakajima was disappointed to have missed out on points |
Having qualified a career-best fifth on Saturday, Kazuki Nakajima made a strong start to move to fourth before strugglinh mid-race and eventually crossing the line in only 11th place. "Kazuki has been continually improving since Barcelona and it's pleasing to see him helping to move the team forward," Sam continued. "The major difference is that he is now contributing directly to the setup process over a race weekend. He was on a shorter first stint than the other drivers because we had to do more laps in Q3 to get a lap time than we had planned to. Unfortunately, that then makes it critical to build up a good gap to the driver behind during the early part of the race, but Kazuki wasn't able to get the gap we needed him to. That caused him to then fall behind the chasing pack in the second stint."
German Rosberg, on the other hand, was running fourth and attacking for a rostrum result before being jumped by Felipe Massa at the final round of stops. "If we could have run at our true pace in the middle stint, Nico would have been racing Barrichello for third place," Michael explained. "As we weren't able to do that, Massa managed to catch Nico, even though he was slower than him. Massa then simply ran longer before the second pit-stop and beat us."
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