For the BMW WilliamsF1 team the first day of practice would see them finish in twelfth and sixteenth positions on the time sheets. Despite what appeared to be a disappointing result for team driver Mark Webber he was reasonable pleased with the results of the day.

In the press conference Webber spoke of his satisfaction with the days efforts, even though he was honest enough to admit that the team has still to find and implement the necessary developments to give it the pace to match its rivals.

Of the first days practice Webber said: "Pretty good. I haven’t really had a good look at how everything panned out, to be honest, because after the second session I had a de-brief and came straight here. We are going okay, we need to be quicker, no question about that, different people run different programmes on a Friday and we have been nowhere on Friday many times this year and turned into being reasonably prepared come Saturday, so there are various things we need to improve on the car.

No question about it, together with BMW, we need to find improvements to get towards the pace. I think the form team at the moment is McLaren, looking at Barcelona they did a very good job and Barcelona is clearly a different circuit to here but they look like they are in reasonable shape, they have the same tyres as us, and that is where the benchmark is."

When questioned as to what the team needs to do to further improve the FW27 Mark very diplomatically avoided this question allowing Technical Director Sam Michael to give his opinions on what the team has to do.

As for what the team has to do, where they can improve Michael said: "I think it comes from everything really. As Mark said, we’ve had a reasonable day today, concentrated quite a bit on our race programme, as everyone would be normally, and the track can change a lot from one day to another here. You would normally see a massive improvement in pace and degradation from Thursday to Saturday. It is a typical Monaco situation as Mike has said before.

But our general pace of the year so far is not where we would really want to be. We still want to improve. We are a team that’s focused on winning and it comes from everything. If you go looking for one holy grail, then won’t find it in this business, you have got to look at the whole package and there are a lot of factors that make that up."

As for the speculation regarding the future of the WilliamsF1 and BMW partnership Michael made it very clear that the relationship is very strong.

Michael said: "On the Williams and BMW relationship, it is a very strong relationship at the moment, from an engineering level all the way up to board level at AG. The whole company has exactly the same philosophy and desires as Williams and both teams want to win and they both agree on how they go about doing their winning.

But in terms of the future, I think BMW have already gone on record as saying that not continuing with Williams is not an option as well. We fully expect to continue with BMW. There’s a difference between putting pressure on yourself to try and perform and the ultimate thing where somebody decides to go somewhere else. But BMW are in the middle of making their decision and we fully respect that process."