Posted on Friday 23 Sep 2011
Fresh from a visit home to Venezuela, AT&T Williams star Pastor Maldonado looks ahead to his first night race in Formula One
Q: What have you been up to since the last race at Monza?
Pastor Maldonado: “I’ve been in Venezuela, which was fantastic. I visited several different places with a film crew from the BBC in England and I think they saw what a beautiful country I come from. We had a good time.”
Q: You’ve never raced in Singapore. How well prepared are you?
PM: “I’ve done as much as I can, without actually driving the track. I’ve been in the simulator at Grove, working with my engineers to try different set-ups on the car and I’ve studied all the data from last year. I know which way the track goes and it looks amazing.”
Q: Do you do anything to prepare specifically for a night race?
PM: “I’ve done some racing at night when I was karting in Venezuela and Colombia, but I was only eight or nine years old. I don’t expect the lack of light to be an issue because when you’re in the car you’re very focused on what you’re doing; you’re not looking at the sky!”
Q: How long will it take you to learn the track?
PM: “I’ll get three runs at the start of FP1 in which to learn it. The first will be about eight laps and that should be enough for me to get my braking references because of what I’ve already done on the simulator. I like street circuits and I’d say this looks like a combination of Monaco and Valencia. Some corners are tight and unforgiving, like in Monaco, and others, like Turn 1, are more open, like at Valencia.”
Q: What are the engineers telling you about the upgrades on the car this weekend?
PM: “We have several new parts, so we hope to make a step forward. But we’ll only find out how much progress we’ve made once the action starts on Friday. Tyre life is going to be critical and we’ll need to manage that situation during the race in order to have more flexibility with the strategy.”
Q: Would you say the car is more competitive on full tanks than it is on light tanks?
PM: “It looks that way. Our pace is very consistent during the race, but we don’t improve as much as some others as the fuel load comes down. The situation is better now than it was at the start of the year, but there’s more work to be done.”
Q: Are you looking forward to working with our new Chief Operations Engineer, Mark Gillan?
PM: “He hasn’t been with the team for long and I don’t know him well, but it’s good to have him on board. He has a lot of experience and I’m sure he’s a good addition to the team. We need to get to know each other this weekend: we need to help him adapt to our way of working and we need to understand how he works.”
Credit: Williams F1 (www.williamsf1.com)
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