BMW must get its act together

Indeed, Nick Heidfeld, the fastest of the German-Swiss team today, will do no better than 11th place during the first session and will rank a mediocre 14th position in the second, more than a second behind Williams by Nico Rosberg. His teammate, Robert Kubica, didn't do much better, finishing 13th and 15th respectively at the end of the two sessions.

Willy Rampf, Coordination Director of the team, gave the first assessment of this first day: “Finally the new season has started. Overall everything went rather well, we did not encounter any particular technical problems, the KERS system worked without any difficulty. »

?We were able to complete our program for the day, we mainly focused on preparations for the race, but for the moment we are not entirely satisfied. The key factor is being able to use both types of rubber perfectly. We will focus on that tomorrow morning, during the last free practice session. », he concluded.

Les pilotes sont eux aussi relativement optimistes quant à leurs possibilités d?améliorer leurs résultats, même s?il est évident qu?il sera difficile pour eux d?atteindre le niveau affiché aujourd?hui par les Williams, Toyota and Brawn GP.

“It’s about time the season started! I have a lot of fun riding here. The Albert Park circuit is not a permanent track, therefore it naturally has a very low level of grip in places, even more so at the start of the weekend. It improved a little during the two sessions, but even at the end, it wasn't really optimal, the car had a tendency to skid in certain braking areas and in some corners as well. », he regretted.

Robert Kubica insisted on this point, the Pole had declared to his engineers when he returned to the pits that he had not driven his car, but that it was indeed the car that did what it wanted. Unable to find the right settings to find a little grip, Kubica hopes to be able to develop the right set-up during the day tomorrow to be able to qualify correctly.

“It was the first Friday of the season, but above all it was a big day of work during which we tried to cover as many kilometers as possible, to try to improve the set-up and proceeded to evaluation of the tires with a view to qualifying initially, but obviously for Sunday's race. »

“We managed to collect a lot of data, we will have to analyze it and understand how we can do better tomorrow. We clearly lack grip compared to our opponents and we need to know why. », added the Polish pilot.