WILLIAMS - Monaco GP Thursday

 

Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: I think the drivers have done a commendable job. We’ve had a couple of issues, but I think for two young drivers trying to get as much track time as possible we certainly haven’t been particularly penalised so that’s good. We purposely kept the programmes simple to maximise track time and that has worked quite well. In FP1 we were quite tactical in how we ran to give our drivers time when the track was quieter. FP2 was then focused on getting their low and high fuel runs in so they could understand the car. I think the car has been reasonably well-balanced, so the engineers have done a good job there. There’s some work for us to do overnight, but we’ve got an extra 24 hours to think about it. It’s amazing that we can get everything done in six hours elsewhere, yet we will take 30 hours in Monaco, but that’s engineers for you. Overall, I think on high and low fuel, the pace has been relatively better than Spain. With the circuit characteristics here, we would expect it to be kinder to us. We’ve done a reasonable job in exploiting the car to get the most out of this circuit.

 

Sergey Sirotkin: I would say today has gone quite well. FP1 was reasonable, FP2 could have been quite a bit better. With the traffic and everything, I didn’t have a clean lap. There was always something compromising my lap, I was not in the right spot or the right window for the tyres. There is room for improvement but it’s good. We’ve seen already position-wise we are better than in Barcelona, but it was not the best of what we could do. I would not say we are very optimistic but it’s looking quite good. It’s challenging but if it was easy anyone would do it. We don’t have the easiest car to drive here. It’s a very demanding car and track but I really enjoy this challenge.

 

Lance Stroll: It was not the best day, but it is the first day, so I am just getting into it and Monaco is one of those places where you need to find the rhythm before you can really execute anything. We have been on the back foot for most of the day and I didn't really feel I had been on top of the car. However, at least I started to get there towards the end of the session, and especially on high fuel on consecutive laps I felt it was getting better and better. We will be piecing everything together and see on Saturday what we can do. For sure we are far from where we want to be, but there is still a lot of time to think about what we can do before qualifying and the race. We look a little bit better this weekend, and I think Sergey showed the car has a little bit more pace.