Sakhir, Bahrain – 6/4/2008
The RBS-backed AT&T Williams team scored another championship point when Nico Rosberg finished eighth in the Bahrain Grand Prix at Sakhir. Team-mate Kazuki Nakajima had a difficult afternoon and finished the race in 14th place.
In a hugely competitive midfield, Rosberg made it through to the final session of qualifying and lined up eighth on the grid, with a lap of 1min, 34.015sec, less than a second slower than Robert Kubica's BMW Sauber in pole position.
"In the final analysis, I guess I should go home happy that we got a point," said Rosberg, "but we should have done better. It was very difficult out there. The tyre performance was very changeable and the wind conditions were different to Friday, when we set our gear ratios. But in the end our package was just not quite good enough."
Nakajima admitted that Bahrain was not the most memorable of his four F1 starts to date. "I had a very bad start and then I had a spin on the oil on lap 2 before the high speed esses, so it couldn't really have begun any worse," he said.
"I managed to keep up a consistent pace after that but the field is competitive and coming from the back it was hard to make any more progress through the field."
Technical director Sam Michael explained: "We came away with a point but we had hoped to be fighting for more than that. We didn't qualify well enough with Nico's car and made it difficult for ourselves with our strategy.
"Then, on Kazuki's car, we had the anti-stall kick in at the start which dropped him right to the very back of the field. He then had a spin on the second lap and had it not been for that would probably have made more progress on the single stop strategy we ran him on. "On the positive side our reliability was solid but we do need to try and find a bit more performance."
That will be aim when the teams return to Europe for a test at Barcelona prior to the opening race of the European season in Spain on April 27.
Frank Williams assessed the AT&T Williams team's start to the 2008 season after the Bahrain Grand Prix. He said: "Clearly, we're in the second pack and not the first. We can be up at the front of that pack, but we saw in Malaysia that you can lose out too. The cars are all fairly closely matched and one little error in the car's set-up direction can cause what happened to us in Sepang. In Bahrain we were better."
Capping the F1 calendar at 20 races in future was discussed again in Bahrain. "We are looking at travelling longer distances and by the end of the year the mechanics are just destroyed," said Frank Williams. "Even with 18 races, you've got to employ quite a few more than you would for just 16. We support 20 races as long as Bernie (Ecclestone) recognises it costs a lot more because we need more people and more equipment..."
Robert Kubica is the first Polish driver to take pole position on an F1 grid, when he qualified fastest for the Bahrain Grand Prix. It was also the first pole position for BMW Sauber. It was achieved in the 38th race for the team and the 25th race for Kubica.
Sauber, founded by Swiss Peter Sauber, had previously recorded a pole position in sportscar racing, achieved at the 256th attempt. "We are only in our third season and topped the grid for the very first time. It is another step up the ladder," said delighted former Williams partner Mario Theissen.
