Spain: A familiar reference point

Coming into Barcelona, there’s always a good bit of familiarity because it’s where we get to drive during winter testing, and this weekend’s race allows us to see how our car has evolved across the first five rounds of the season.

Barcelona gives a stable reference point that we can use to underline our understanding of the FW44.

By the very nature of the calendar – taking Bahrain out of the thinking, you have street track after street track and then Imola presented mixed conditions the whole weekend. So, that hasn’t made for much consistency in terms of evaluating our package and carrying out any cross-team comparisons. I’m looking forward to getting onto a ‘normal’ track in Barcelona and having a straight forward weekend where we can try to make some more steps. I’m curious to see how we’ll perform in Spain.

On the whole, my results at the last race in Miami were much, much better than they appeared on face value because there were quite a lot of differences between the Williams cars and that was costing me quite a lot of lap time. Whereas this weekend, we expect our cars to be much more similar.

Since Miami, I’ve been trying to add as many extra days with the team as possible. As well as doing meetings and other stuff at Williams, I’ve spent a lot of days in the simulator putting in extra time, trying to expedite wherever I can in the areas that we know we need to address. There’s a lot of additional work going on to try and accelerate our results. That’s not something people always see from the outside!

So far, it’s been hard to get the feeling that I need with the car to get the most out of it and push it to the limit. But I’m not alone; we’ve seen other drivers struggling and making mistakes because the cars are a lot more on edge. I’m looking forward to Barcelona weekend.

There’s a definite drive and willingness from me and everyone else at Williams to work hard and continue pushing forward. Hopefully the familiarity of Barcelona will give us that extra boost we all want.