03
May
2003
|
12:00
Europe/Amsterdam

Spanish GP - Final Qualifying

Summary
The result of today's final qualifying confirmed the trend of what has been a difficult weekend so far for the BMW WilliamsF1 Team. Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya were 7th and 9th respectively and will start tomorrow's Spanish Grand Prix from the fourth and fifth rows of the starting grid, Ralf ahead and Juan Pablo just behind him.

Weather: Sunny, dry, 23°C Air, 34°C Track

Barcelona (ESP). The result of today's final qualifying confirmed the trend of
what has been a difficult weekend so far for the BMW WilliamsF1 Team. Ralf
Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya were 7th and 9th respectively and will start
tomorrow's Spanish Grand Prix from the fourth and fifth rows of the starting
grid, Ralf ahead and Juan Pablo just behind him.

Ralf Schumacher: 7th
Chassis: FW25 05
Best time: 1.19.006 min
There is no doubt that we cannot be satisfied with our qualifying result as our
pace is too far away from the top teams. However I believe that we can do well
tomorrow with our race strategy. Realistically, we had higher expectations of
our performance on this circuit after our most recent test . It is now a matter
of hoping that we have the right balance for the race to enable us to score a
useful amount of points.

Juan Pablo Montoya: 9th
Chassis: Spare Chassis: FW25 04
Best time: 1.19.377 min
It?s been a difficult weekend but I think finally we have sorted my car, which
is still not very good but at least its handling has improved and it is now
driveable. Right before the warm up I was told there was a fuel pump problem on
my race car so I had to switch to the T-car and that didn't help either. We are
starting tomorrow from fairly poor grid positions but this is what we've got at
the moment and we have to deal with it and make the most of our race.

Sam Michael (Chief Operations Engineer, WilliamsF1):
Obviously we would have liked to have finished higher up. We have spent the
weekend so far looking for improvements in the cars' balance which has been
bettered again for today's second qualifying. Now we will work on optimising
our strategy for tomorrow and hope for a good race.

Mario Theissen (BMW Motorsport Director):
After the fastest times Ralf set here in our test in March and in Friday's free
practice, today both our drivers were not really happy with the set up of their
cars. As we expect to see different strategies as the race unfolds, it is
difficult to evaluate the qualifying performances of our competitors.

Juan switched to the T-car because just before the warm up we detected a fuel
pump operational failure. Although we could have run both the warm up and the
final qualifying with that fuel pump, as we could have changed it for the race
without being penalised, for the sake of precaution, we preferred putting Juan
Pablo in the spare car, which was set for him anyway.

Press Contact: Joerg Kottmeier
Tel: +49-89-382-23401
E-mail: joerg.kottmeier@bmw.de
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