Williams suffered a disappointing afternoon in Germany, as both of its drivers failed to make the points.
Although Rubens Barrichello and Nico Hulkenberg qualified in the top ten, both were compromised by a difficult start; which saw them fall down the order.
Thereafter, neither driver had the pace to make inroads on the top ten, with Barrichello finishing in twelfth and Hulkenberg fourteenth.
Rubens Barrichello – 12th: I had a very difficult start to the race, my pull away was not very good. I was running in position for the hairpin when Kobayashi’s move on the inside left no braking margin, which backed everybody up. During both stints on the option and prime tyre, our pace was much the same as the cars in front, but having lost track position, there wasn’t enough pace differential to make up position.
Nico Hulkenberg – 13th: Really the race today was defined by the start, which for me was not good and the places lost could not be recovered. I ran a long first stint on the option tyre, which was the right thing to do given our position, but it was very hard to make any progress taking the option tyre to lap 34. The car pace wasn’t really there today and with a pretty uneventful race, there wasn’t even the possibility of an unexpected opportunity to reclaim some advantage.
Sam Michael, Technical Director: It was not a satisfying outcome to miss out on points today. We struggled with poor starts on both cars which dropped us a couple of positions immediately. With similar pace to all the cars around us, we then tried two quite different strategies to recover, but nothing went wrong with the other team strategies, so we couldn’t make a difference. We’ll now look to improvements for next week’s race in Budapest.
