WILLIAMS HEAD OF VEHICLE PERFORMANCE

What’s the mood about the FW43 after the fine qualifying result in Hungary?

Everyone is obviously feeling very positive. We came here a little bit cautious off the back of two races at the same venue. The circuit here is very different, but actually the car’s performed pretty well so everyone is very happy and quite encouraged.

Some teams think Hungary shows where they sit in the pecking order. Is that the same for Williams?

This circuit is a bit of a standout alongside Monaco, possibly Singapore, so even if the car is good here, it’s perhaps not necessarily what you want for the whole season, although of course we don’t know necessarily where we’re going to go for a good portion of this year. I’d really rather reserve judgement and see how we go at Silverstone, which is quite different, and see how we can tune the behaviour to suit there. I’m not sure it would be fair to say because we were P12 [in qualifying with George Russell] here, we’ll be P12 everywhere.

How did George Russell and Nicholas Latifi compare in Q2? The cars are a little bit different. With [the media] not being here, or the photographers not being here, not everyone has picked it up. But we’ve had an upgrade that has been alternating on one car and then the other for the last couple of races as we’ve only had one set. So, George had that this week and I think that probably played the part [in the qualifying difference]. It’s quite powerful here, so probably Nicholas was always going to find it a little bit harder here relative to George, and that’s why he felt the need to really go for broke in a Q2 lap but it didn’t quite pay off. I think he should still be extremely proud with what he did with the car he had [15th]. Having both experienced it on and off, they are very convinced it’s a clear advantage so they will both be furnished with it in the next race.