WilliamsF1 Team Comments Saturday Qualifying

By Andrew Hooper
May 3 2003



	Spanish GP Saturday - Team Comments

	The result of today's final qualifying confirmed the trend of what has been a difficult weekend so far for the BMW WilliamsF1 Team. Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya were 7th and 9th respectively and will start tomorrow's Spanish Grand Prix from the fourth and fifth rows of the starting grid, Ralf ahead and Juan Pablo just behind him.

	Juan Pablo Montoya "It?s been a difficult weekend but I think finally we have sorted my car, which is still not very good but at least its handling has improved and it is now driveable. Right before the warm up I was told there was a fuel pump problem on my race car so I had to switch to the T-car and that didn't help either. We are starting tomorrow from fairly poor grid positions but this is what we've got at the moment and we have to deal with it and make the most of our race."

	Ralf Schumacher "There is no doubt that we cannot be satisfied with our qualifying result as our pace is too far away from the top teams. However I believe that we can do well tomorrow with our race strategy. Realistically, we had higher expectations of our performance on this circuit after our most recent test . It is now a matter of hoping that we have the right balance for the race to enable us to score a useful amount of points."

	Dr Mario Theissen BMW Motorsports Director "After the fastest times Ralf set here in our test in March and in Friday's free practice, today both our drivers were not really happy with the set up of their cars. As we expect to see different strategies as the race unfolds, it is difficult to evaluate the qualifying performances of our competitors. Juan switched to the T-car because just before the warm up we detected a fuel pump operational failure. Although we could have run both the warm up and the final qualifying with that fuel pump, as we could have changed it for the race without being penalised, for the sake of precaution, we preferred putting Juan Pablo in the spare car, which was set for him anyway."

	Sam Michael Chief Operations Engineer WilliamsF1 "Obviously we would have liked to have finished higher up. We have spent the weekend so far looking for improvements in the cars' balance which has been bettered again for today's second qualifying. Now we will work on optimising our strategy for tomorrow and hope for a good race."

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