Melbourne, Australia - 16/3/2008
The RBS-supported AT&T Williams team turned a difficult opening day into a superb start to the 2008 Formula 1 World Championship as Nico Rosberg finished third and Kazuki Nakajima sixth in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.
The team suffered a reliability issue with the gearboxes in Friday first practice and then a differential problem on Rosberg's car in the afternoon session, meaning limited opportunity to collect data. Rosberg was therefore delighted to qualify seventh, realising his hopes of fighting at the head of the midfield battle. Nakajima made it through to Q2 and started the race 14th.
After surviving a spin on his formation lap, Rosberg made a flying start and ran fourth on the opening lap, behind the two McLaren Mercedes and splitting the BMW Saubers. Nico maintained his form throughout a dramatic 58-lap race that featured three Safety Car periods and finally scored his first ever F1 podium finish. He lost out narrowly to Nick Heidfeld's BMW as they both pitted together on lap 21 and finished just 2.6s behind the second placed German.
"It was really great to be up there on the podium,"; Rosberg said. "It's been a while, more than two and a half years since the last time in GP2. I'm really happy for the whole team. They have been working very hard and this is a big step forward for the whole team. We also have a lot of development coming, so I think we are set up for a good year.";
Nakajima was also delighted to score three points in just his second GP: "At the start a car spun in front of me and I damaged my nose. Then, with the various Safety Car periods the team did a great job to swap my strategy to a one-stop and that put me back in the points. Towards the end of the race I had another incident when all the cars were backed up into each other and I damaged the nose again, but it was great to be able to demonstrate my fitness and consistency.";
The team packed up immediately and headed for the Malaysian GP in just seven days time, second in the constructors' championship.
Nico Rosberg scored his first F1 podium after a spin on the way to the grid! "I had a very big vibration in qualifying, which was a problem and so they had to change the front brake pads,"; he explained. "Suddenly I had much more grip on the front, which caught me by surprise. I hadn't anticipated how much I had to go rearwards on the brake balance. It wasn't ideal to start the race like that but it worked out okay!";
Excitement at Kazuki Nakajima's sixth place and the RBS Williams team's double points score was dampened slightly by the news that race stewards found Nakajima guilty of the collision that eliminated Robert Kubica's BMW Sauber during the third Safety Car period. Nakajima will therefore suffer a 10-place grid penalty at the next race in Malaysia.
The front row of the Melbourne grid was the combined youngest in the history of Grand Prix racing. Lewis Hamilton put his McLaren Mercedes on pole position, aged 23 years and 69 days. Sitting beside him was Robert Kubica's BMW Sauber, the Pole born just a month to the day before Britain's new star. On the inside of the second row sat Heikki Kovalainen who, at 26, the same as fellow second row starter Felipe Massa, could hardly be accused of being old.
