Williams have been left surprised with their performance after a stoic first two practice sessions at the Spanish Grand Prix.
The team did manage to enter the top ten in the first session, with Bottas setting a lap time of 1m25.672s to finish seventh, and Massa finishing ninth with a lap time of 1m26.186s. The drivers fell out of the top ten in the second session though, with Bottas in 11th place with a best time of 1m25.708s and Massa in 16th with a best time of 1m26.491s.
Rob Smedley, outlined the work they had got through, but stressed that they had more work to do in some areas.
“We’ve had an interesting day,” Smedley said. “We’ve mainly been concentrating on the car set-up, and trying to find different areas to work on which would suit this type of circuit.
“It’s a very low-efficiency type of circuit, where the benefit of low drag and high power is less favourable, so we’re trying to find a way to claw back a little bit of performance.
“We were a little bit more competitive in FP1 than we were in FP2, so we need to look at what changes we made between the sessions and understand if they have affected that. In the long runs we looked okay, not where we want to be yet, but it was reasonably competitive.
“On the lower fuel runs we’ve got some work to do overnight, especially in sector three, as the cars were not very well balanced.”
Despite this, Massa was more damning of his performance which saw him struggle at times and spin at Turn 5 during first practice.
“It wasn’t a very fantastic Friday,” the Brazilian said. “I managed to understand the tyres which is the most important thing. I made some mistakes on my laps on the new tyres, which is why I couldn’t do a better lap time.
“It wasn’t like the Friday we had in Russia, but we are working hard for tomorrow to be as fast as we can.”
