Brace yourselves for Bahrain, host of the second round of the 2018 FIA Formula One World Championship, where the midfield battle resumes in the Middle East. Williams travels to Sakhir off the back of a challenging weekend in Melbourne with Lance Stroll finishing 14th meanwhile Sergey Sirotkin retired with a brake failure on his Formula One race debut. Bahrain presents the team with a new opportunity to extract the full potential of the Williams Mercedes FW41. With poor weather limiting track time at the Barcelona pre-season tests, teams are still learning about their 2018 challengers, and Bahrain will be sure to throw up some surprises.
For Bahrain, Pirelli has made available the medium, soft and supersoft tyres.
Williams Chief Technical Officer Paddy Lowe:
Bahrain is a great track with a unique atmosphere under the lights as darkness falls in the desert. It is a tricky race for car setup, as FP1 and FP3 occur in the afternoon with very high track temperatures and do not represent the cooler conditions seen in the twilight sessions for qualifying and the race. Therefore, FP2 is extremely important for our preparation. It will be interesting to see how the 2018 tyres perform in Bahrain and if they throw up more variety in race strategies.
It is the first normal race track of the 2018 season with more predictable weather, so we should get a more representative comparison of the underlying performance of each team. After Sergey’s unfortunate DNF in Australia from a freak plastic bag, we hope to get him to complete his first race distance and that Lance can show well at his second year at this circuit.
Lance Stroll:
As usual, this will certainly be a hot weekend. I enjoy the track, and it has a good rhythm to it. The conditions during the weekend are always tricky because the practice is during the day and then qualifying and the race are at night. This means there is a lot of adapting going on throughout the weekend. However, I think it is going to be a good one and am looking forward to getting back there.
Sergey Sirotkin:
I can’t wait for the weekend to begin. It was a very tough weekend in Melbourne and I really feel like I need another shot to bring us back to where we think we deserve to be. To start everything from zero, and to try and get some confidence back in all of us. I know the track quite well and I think it suits some strong points of our car. I’m looking forward to it and let’s see what we can do.
That’s Thursday done and dusted at @BAH_Int_Circuit ✅
Tomorrow, the track action starts! ?
Hear from Lance and @sirotkin_sergey as they discuss this weekend’s #BahrainGP ??#WeAreRacing #F1 pic.twitter.com/nh8kqP36my
— WILLIAMS RACING (@WilliamsRacing) April 5, 2018
