Williams on first day of testing

Mike Coughlan, Technical Director: Jerez is a unique circuit that we don’t race on during the season and it provides the perfect opportunity to do some final test and development work ahead of the FW35 launch. Today was a good day for us with Pastor completing 84 laps in the FW34. We concentrated on running some new systems in preparation for the FW35, as well as some planned set-up changes. We would be reluctant to do these over a normal race weekend as you lose too much track time making the changes, so it was ideal for us to get these into our programme today. It was also interesting to see the new Pirelli tyres in action and having the FW34 here helped us to really understand how the tyres are working.

Pastor Maldonado: We had no problems today and the car felt very consistent so we were able to learn a lot, which will be useful for the FW35 development. We planned to run the FW34 to enable us to have a reliable car to test the new tyres with and also try some different set-ups. It’s great to finally be back on track after what felt like a long winter and I’m confident we can achieve a lot this week.

The Williams F1 Team will be back on track tomorrow, Wednesday 6 February, with Pastor Maldonado continuing in the FW34 for the second day of the test.