Quote:

gpl
From Atlas forum
I don't think it's looking hopeless, even though as Rubens says, he doesn't see himself winning races in the near future.

Just thinking: if the Bahrein upgrade had worked and instead of losing 0.2sec (and therefore retaining status quo by running the Barcelona package) they would have gained 0.2 sec, by my calculations Rubens would have been 6th. Not a huge achievement but instead of being slightly slower than Renault and Force India, we would be slightly faster than them, IMHO. We would probably also have qualified slightly better, and finished slightly ahead of Jenson and Michael, who didn't look very comfortable in that car yet. Again, who knows for sure, but 0.2 could have really meant a lot.

Anyway, here's more quotes from Rubens. I think it's great that he speaks his mind and there's no other driver in the grid that brings us so much information about how his team is doing - if I'm wrong will someone please correct me... the quotes are from Brazilian site Tazio and the website has the audio of its interviews, lest someone thinks I make up these quotes, as has been suggested elsewhere...

"The race itself was like when you study a lot to get approved into a college, and then you find yourself in a different situation then you thought you would... at the start, I pushed every button that I could push, but there was a problem that I reported to the team: my brakes were locking a bit excessively in the back, they were warming up only in the back. So I had to be very careful at the start of the race and even lost a position to Liuzzi."

"Williams did not make a dud of a car. It wasn't a case where the car is born with problems. The car is not a bad car, but it has problems in some areas that can be addressed".

"It's no time for excuses. That's the truth. The car is not very competitive right now, the four teams [Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes] are ahead of us, we also have Force India there, and Renault there, and I need to put myself in this situation where I can try to start 7th or 8th, and score points from 5th to 10th, in this early part [of the season]".

"I think we can score points in these first 5 races, 1-5 points per race. Besides that, we will need to be a bit lucky and we will need to qualify ahead of ourselves"

Here's the meat and potatoes:

"We are extracting a midfield performance from the car, we ended 15sec from the 4th and 5th placed car, which isn't terrible, but it's far from perfect, because we lack in traction and we have an electronics problem where changing gears is a bit slow. I don't think we're extracting all the available performance from the car. I'm sure that this traction problem can be fixed. Once we get our aerodynamics improvements and we fix our eletronics issues with the gear changes, we can have a significant improvement. But I don't know if we can get to the top at this season and I'm not even asking myself if we can, though that is ultimately the goal".

"We might surprise people on some days. I had a very atypical Friday, didn't do a lot of running because we had problems, then we found more problems on Saturday morning. And at qualifying I still qualified 11th and almost made it into the 3rd qualy [despite all problems], so I still think that from time to time, Williams can surprise people".

There you have it. A very driven, very focused driver who knows what he's doing, knows what goes on with the car, knows what can be improved and who can clearly help Williams get back to the top. Count me in as a Barrica fan

Also to Cosworth, they clearly have created a very competitive engine that has power, reliability and consumption seems OK too

Thankyou.

Quote:

gpl
I try not to make the same mistake year, after year, after year,after year, after year.

Quote:

gpl
I try not to make the same mistake year, after year, after year,after year, after year.