Driver: Pastor Maldonado / Valtteri Bottas
Chassis / engine: FW35-01 / RS27-5409/3
Location: Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona 4.655km
Objectives: Tyre testing and aero evaluations
Weather: Dry and sunny
Air & track temps: 5-16ºC / 4-33ºC

Day three of the Williams F1 teams test at the Circuit de Catalunya would see both Pastor Maldonado and Valtteri Bottas shared the driving duties. After two days of wet conditions the team was looking forward to some dry running with the team having brought several upgrades to the FW35 including new sidepods. Pastor would not get out onto the track until well into the morning session as a result of the team fitting the new parts and by the end he had completed thirty five laps with a bets time of 1m:22.305 set on supersoft tyres to be fourth fastest.

The afternoon session would see Valtteri take over and he would continue the teams aerodynamic evaluations including testing different front wings. Valtteri's first run would be on the soft tyre setting a 1m:25.396 and after some setup changes would return on the hard tyres followed by other runs on the medium tyre. He would progressively improve on his times as the afternoon progressed and would eventually set a 1m:22.468 on the soft tyre right near the end of the session to be just behind Pastor in the overall times. Both drivers had focused on shorter runs during the day as they worked through their test programme.

Mike Coughlan, Technical Director: We brought our updated core bodywork for the first race here this weekend. Pastor spent the morning doing system checks with it before Valtteri went through new sets of each compound tyre this afternoon. Tomorrow we aim to do more performance runs with some further upgrades ahead of Australia.

Pastor Maldonado: We were running quite a few new parts this morning so our focus was on learning more about them and how they make the car behave. It felt very different, but it’s too early to say how much performance gain they will bring. We have some good data for the engineers to analyse now, so we will see. I was able to do a good time despite the limited running which shows that we are still improving.

Valtteri Bottas: I could really feel the difference today running the updated bodywork. We saw some improvements immediately but we still need to work on the car balance to maximise the potential. Overall, we learnt a lot and it’s nice to see the work everyone has been doing at the factory having a positive influence on the car. It’s now up to us to get the lap time out of it.