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gpl
From the way I read it Sam is saying that they have over cooled the Cosworth engine, and now they can go about making that area more compact, if this to be believed.
I am not sure what to believe from them anymore.

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gpl
I WILL WAIT A FEW MORE RACES, IF WE ARE NOT UP THERE I WANT WILLIAMS TO REPLACE HIM BY MID SEASON, AND GET SOMBODY/ ANYBODY ELSE IN THE TEAM BUT HIM AS OUR NEW TD.BEFORE HE DRAGS THIS TEAM DOWN THE DRAIN, AND OUT OF F1 FOREVER.
IF HE TURNS IT AROUND THIS YEAR AND THAT MEANS PODIUMS THEN I WILL APOLOGIZE,IF NOT HE HAD HIS CHANCE AND CAME UP WAY SHORT, TIME TO MOVE ON COBBER

I have never felt some knumb and dissapointed watching my team this weekend,it is spoiling my favourite sport, along with these@#$%&rules, and uneven budgets.

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Bond

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gpl
I WILL WAIT A FEW MORE RACES, IF WE ARE NOT UP THERE I WANT WILLIAMS TO REPLACE HIM BY MID SEASON, AND GET SOMBODY/ ANYBODY ELSE IN THE TEAM BUT HIM AS OUR NEW TD.BEFORE HE DRAGS THIS TEAM DOWN THE DRAIN, AND OUT OF F1 FOREVER.
IF HE TURNS IT AROUND THIS YEAR AND THAT MEANS PODIUMS THEN I WILL APOLOGIZE,IF NOT HE HAD HIS CHANCE AND CAME UP WAY SHORT, TIME TO MOVE ON COBBER

I have never felt some knumb and dissapointed watching my team this weekend,it is spoiling my favourite sport, along with these@#$%&rules, and uneven budgets.

100% in agreement.
Results are what counts.
We've been going on for 6 years now backwards with most of that time under SM's stewardship.

Can't fire the team, so you have to fire the manager if the results aren't there.

I will go on here also & eat crow too if we linearly go upwards in the standings this year. There is nothing more I want than to bleed blue & white climbing upwards @ lightspeed...much less acquiring some podiums.

But there has to be progress. & so far, there has been a bunch of stop & go & stumbling.

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like_a_rocket

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

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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!

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Sam Michael
The team return from the inaugural race of the season in Bahrain with just one point following Rubens' 10th place. Sam Michael de-briefs the weekend from a technical perspective.
Q: Did the performance of the FW32 match your pre-season expectations?
SM: We had quite a few issues to sort out in the days leading up to the Grand Prix and it became apparent early on that we would have some fire-fighting to do in the build-up to the race to ensure we finished on Sunday. Because of that, we had three or four things on the FW32 in Bahrain that we couldn't change quickly. Most of those elements can be corrected over the next couple of races and that should offer a good step in performance.

Q: Rubens set the sixth fastest lap of the race. Does that give us an indication of the car’s true potential?
SM: Not really. When Rubens set that time he actually had some damage on his car. We expect to be stronger in forthcoming races.

Q: How did the tyres hold up during the race, particularly during the early stages when the car was at its heaviest?
SM: Tyres weren't a problem. The option was the strongest tyre throughout the race. The prime was good, but it offered less grip.

Q: Did the team have any reliability problems during the course of the weekend?
SM: Yes. We had some issues during practice but, through a huge amount of effort and late nights put in by the team’s mechanics, we managed to keep them contained.

Q: Were you pleased with the performance of the Cosworth engine?
SM: Yes. The engine is good and the crew in Northampton have done an exceptional job in a short space of time.

Q: How did Nico handle his race debut?
SM: Nico handled himself well. He was quick throughout practice, but then he made a small, but time costly, mistake in qualifying. He then had a bit of a messy race. Nico is a smart guy who's developing a great relationship with his engineers, Tom McCullough and Andrew Murdoch, and I know he'll deliver.