Shanghai, China - 19/10/2008
The RBS-supported AT&T Williams team's race prospects at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai were tempered by a poor qualifying outcome, which gave the team limited opportunities to compete for a good finish.
In the end, Kazuki Nakajima finished12th, and Nico Rosberg 15th in a race won by McLaren's Lewis Hamilton. The race for the drivers' championship will be decided at the final race of the season in Brazil after Hamilton's title rival, Felipe Massa, was handed second place by Ferrari team-mate Kimi Raikkonen.
Given the qualifying result, the AT&T Williams team deployed a one-stop strategy for Kazuki and a two-stop strategy for Nico to retain the widest degree of flexibility for differing race scenarios.
However, the absence of any major weather or safety-car events and the timing of pit stops meant that the one-stop option for Kazuki proved to be the more fruitful. He advanced from 17th on the grid to 12th at the finish, a position he strongly defended on the run to the flag.
He said: "I think it was a good race for me considering where I started. Initially it was very hard work managing the car on a heavy fuel load. I lost position off the line, but during the first stint I managed to develop a good race pace.
"The other significant part of the race for me was the last period when I had to work hard to keep quite a few cars behind me and defend my position, and I was pleased that I succeeded in this."
Nico was less able to progress with his two-stop strategy, although he said it was not for the want of trying.
"We ran a different strategy to Kazuki just to see if we could generate some advantage, but it didn't pay off and it wasn't a lot of fun driving at the back," he said. "It didn't really represent our capability as our pace was okay and we were the tenth fastest car."
Director of engineering Patrick Head explained that it was a different problem that hurt the team's competitiveness in Shanghai to the one they experienced in 2007. "This year, it was really a characteristic of our car in high-speed corners and it wasn't associated with the tyres. Last year, we had a problem with micro graining on the tyres and we have spent a lot of time in testing understanding what caused it. Nico said it was one of the things we could pull out as being a success of the weekend."
Patrick Head says that Williams and a number of other teams could start the 2009 season without the new Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) on the car. Head explained that the move back to slick tyres next year could well lead to more forward-based weight distribution proving optimal, which might be difficult to achieve with the bulk of the KERS system rearwards of the chassis midpoint. "You may find KERS being introduced progressively," he explained.
Britain's Lewis Hamilton is poised to become the youngest world champion in F1 history if he finishes fifth or better in the season closing Brazilian Grand Prix. Williams co-owner Patrick Head refused to join a cascade of criticism which had followed Hamilton's first corner error at the previous race in Japan. "Lewis is a fighter and a racer and I guess he always wants to be first," he said. "I'm sure people will talk to him but you can't always take that out of a driver. Whether or not to fight for first place is a problem I would like to have!"
