Q. How did the inclement weather on Friday and Saturday morning affect your preparations for a dry race?
Sam Michael: It did have some bearing in that we had some new parts that we wanted to test but couldn’t due to the bad weather. We will now run them in Budapest. Everything else, including work on set-up, tyres and cooling, was covered off in Friday afternoon’s session.
Q. The FW32 featured more updates at Hockenheim. What were they and how did they affect performance?
SM: We had revised diffusers on both cars this weekend. They worked well and demonstrably improved both drivers’ lap times.
Q. For the second time in three races you had both cars in Q3, but neither could match their Q2 times. Why was that?
SM: Both cars had great runs in Q2. Off the back of that, we thought we could achieve 7th and 8th in Q3. However, both Rubens and Nico’s Q3 times were compromised by too much understeer towards the end of their fastest laps, so we only managed 8th and 10th places.
Q. Both drivers made poor starts. Was that simply down to being on the dirty side of the grid, or did they have technical issues?
SM: It was a combination of the two. Both drivers were on the dirty side of the grid while our overall ability to get off the line was impeded. We didn’t have any technical issues per se, so we need to work hard to improve our starts.
Discussion about this post