14/10/2012
NEWS STORY
It was a challenging day for the Williams F1 Team with Pastor and Bruno finishing in 14th and 15th respectively. Both cars moved up from their qualifying position but finished the race outside of the points. Both drivers started on the supersoft tyres, with Pastor opting for a one-stop strategy. Bruno drove a two-stop race but lost a lot of time in the first stint with suspected debris caught in the front wing.
Pastor Maldonado: At the beginning of the race, we were too hard on the front tyres which meant that we couldn't go as fast as we would have liked. After the pitstop things were better and we were able to do 30 laps on that set of tyres. Overall, we were not fast enough this weekend, so we need to work out why and try to improve for the next race.
Bruno Senna: It was a frustrating race for me because I didn't make many mistakes this weekend which makes it all the more disappointing to finish where we did. We need to work hard on the issues we've been having because the grid is very close. We will keep pushing and if we have a weekend where we get everything together, we can be in the points again. Hopefully next weekend will be one of those.
Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer: We split strategies today with both cars having clean races, but ultimately our pace was simply not strong enough and we ended up with Pastor in 14th and Bruno right behind in 15th. We now need to regroup and sort out a few performance inconsistency issues on the car ahead of the next race in India.
Laurent Debout, Renault Sport F1 team support leader: It is a disappointing result to finish out of the points, but it was hard to make up ground from our starting position with the marbles and debris off the racing line. With two weeks between now and the next race we can work with Williams to come back stronger in India.
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