Rosberg's Hungarian Grand Prix

By WilliamsF1 Team
August 12 2006

 
Rosberg's Hungarian Grand Prix
 

“With a three week break before the Turkish Grand Prix I've just touched down on a holiday island for a couple of weeks off, away from the F1 circus. The sun is blazing and the conditions couldn't be more different to Sunday's race in Hungary, the first really wet one of the season.

RosbergNormally I enjoy racing in the wet but this weekend we had a pretty tough time with the tyres. Neither Mark nor I could get any heat into them and there were handfuls of oversteer. As a result my race strategy was to take it very easy at the beginning, build up my speed and make sure that I stayed on the track.

After a frantic start, where I was pretty much blinded by spray, my race was going well, I was driving to the conditions and felt like there was no way I was coming off that track. On lap 19 though my car had other plans for me…

We got some water in the electronics system, it tricked the car into thinking I was in the garage and switched on the automatic rev limiter that normally kicks in at the pit lane entrance. Turning in on a left-hander I shifted down, expecting the revs to increase and match the lower gear, the limiter kept them low though and the engine braking effect locked up the rear wheels. In those wet conditions I had no chance and spun off.

It was a real shame because that morning I'd been delighted to see the rain coming down as it is always a great leveller. Free practice hadn't gone too well, you have a restricted number of new tyres for the race weekend and I only had one set to use in practice. When I was able to run on them there was oil on the track so I decided to drive pretty cautiously.

As a result, going into qualifying I didn't have much of a feel for how the car was going to perform on new tyres. I would have rather had two practice sessions on new rubber so that I could have built up to a proper qualifying pace.

In spite of that I put in a pretty decent qualifying lap and was about equal with my team-mate Mark Webber's time, but made a slight mistake three turns from the end; I braked too late, lost seven tenths of a second and that was it, 18th on the grid.

Conditions should be very different in Turkey and it'll be a great race to come back to after this break. I drove there last year in GP2 and it’s a great circuit. I'm looking forward to taking the FW28 out there, we've definitely progressed over the last three races so I think we're on an upward curve and should be capable of a points finish out there or at the very least a top ten.

Finally, just a quick word on next year's driver line-up. The team announced last week that I'll be driving alongside Alex Wurz next season, who is currently our test driver. He's done a really good job in testing for us and he's always been quick, he has very strong technical understanding and experience and it will be great to have him as a race driver beside me. I'm looking forward to it.”

 
 

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