George Russell has confirmed the chassis changes that have been undertaken at Williams ahead of this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.
Rumours in Azerbaijan mounted that Williams was preparing a new chassis intended for Robert Kubica but that it instead went to Russell after the Briton’s chassis was wrecked by the drain incident.
Williams has endured a difficult start to the campaign and Kubica repeatedly emphasised his view that the two FW42s had inherent differences, producing separate on-track outcomes from the same baseline set-up.
Russell confirmed on Friday at Barcelona that he is using the chassis Kubica ran for the first four grands prix, while Kubica is now using the newer chassis that Russell used in the wake of the Azerbaijan drain incident.
“I’m in Robert’s chassis this weekend, there was a new chassis Robert was getting, which was always the plan, but then because my chassis was damaged from Baku, I’ve now been allocated his chassis,” said Russell, who was half a second faster than Kubica in FP2.
On Williams’ pace at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Russell said: “It was a fairly decent day considering we didn’t bring anything major to the car, just a couple of test items.
“It sounds like everyone else was bringing huge updates, the pace was probably closer than what we expected really.
“So there’s small positives to take from that and we learned some good things from the things we did test.”
On whether he was able to note gains from the FW42, a hesitant Kubica replied: “Well FP1 felt a bit better, FP2 not really. Yeah, I think I didn’t have any big updates here on my car which I could feel any difference compared to previous races.”
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