Williams struggled for pace in Friday's Abu Dhabi practice, joining Lotus, Virgin and HRT at the back of the timesheets...
Williams:
Rubens Barrichello: "We had a little setback up in the morning with a problem with the engine so we were playing catch up in the afternoon. The team did a good job to change the engine between sessions. The one we ran in the second session had quite a few kilometres on it already now that we are near the end of the season, but it did a good job."
Pastor Maldonado: "We covered all our scheduled running today. For me, that included working hard on optimising the set-up of my car for the race because of the grid penalty. We still have to do some more work in order to find a better balance. If we can do that, it will help our performance a bit. The tyres are doing well here; degradation is quite low, so that's a positive."
Team Lotus:
Heikki Kovalainen: "Not too bad at all. Both sessions were pretty straightforward and we kept making improvements all day. The car felt good on both sets of tyres - the track here has really good grip levels and the degradation on the softs was pretty low, certainly manageable, so that looks good for Sunday. The main thing is that our Fridays are now all solid, giving us the chance to really dial the cars in and that means we can work on maximising our pace on Saturday and Sundays, and you can see the evidence of that from our recent races."
Jarno Trulli: "That was a good Friday for us. The car felt pretty balanced all day and we kept improving on each run, so I think we're looking ok for the rest of the weekend. Both tyre compounds behaved pretty well here - the softs weren't going off too quickly at all so I think that gives us good options for the race, and there's a bit of performance difference between the softs and the mediums so we might be able to do something with that in qualifying - let's see."
Virgin:
Timo Glock: "This morning I had a bit of trouble. I had a technical problem so I had to wait a bit longer to go out on track. So it was a bit of a difficult first practice, the car wasn't that great and it needs a different set-up here to what we were running in the past. So it was a little difficult to get anything out of the car. At the end I also had to do some system checks which made it hard for me to improve my lap time. So it wasn't the best of starts to the day. FP2 was a more standard programme. We made some set-up changes that proved to be a better direction and made the car more driveable. It was good to see Robert in the car today. I think it is well-deserved after winning the World Series Championship. So it was a great day for him I'm sure."
Jerome D'Ambrosio: "It was a busy FP2, trying to complete as many laps as we could and I tried to get as much information as I could, as well as fine-tuning the car. The last run was positive. I think we are heading in the right direction and the work we have done today should definitely make tomorrow a better day."
HRT:
Tonio Liuzzi: "It was good to be back in the car, I had missed this feeling these two weeks off so I wanted to be back behind the wheel as soon as possible. The morning session went quite well as we completed the entire programme. The track had really low grip so we were drifting a lot but the balance of the car wasn't too bad and we accumulated some decent data. In the afternoon we couldn't finish the programme because of some electronics issue which kept us in the box for a while which is a shame. The car wasn't as good as in the morning so we have to work on understanding this. The track temperature was lower in the afternoon and as the sun went down the car was much less driveable so we need to find out if this happens to everyone or if it is our problem."
Daniel Ricciardo: "I wasn't particularly happy with the first session in the morning because we started off a little bit away from our set-up and what we normally have. We made a few changes for the afternoon but it didn't make the step we were hoping so it's going to call for a bit more tomorrow. We need to work tonight and make some changes and cross our fingers that it works for tomorrow. I remain positive and think we still have some more to get out of the car. Hopefully our improvement starts tomorrow morning in FP3 so that we head into qualifying full of confidence."
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