F1: Don't blame Rubens, says Williams

Pastor Maldonado is not crowing about having beaten the most experienced driver in F1 in yesterday's qualifying. And although he's a bit frustrated, Rubens Barrichello is not overly down-heartened, either.

Williams have been making good strides in recent races but their performance at Silverstone took the team by surprise: all of a sudden either the other teams had found something seriously special or Williams were driving around with a block of concrete dragging behind. At Silverstone, they brought both cars home but not close to the points. They struggled with the conditions and made much of them but the reality is that somewhere, something had gone horribly wrong in the development. The lack of testing time hampers teams who try to do something different and so Williams' innovation may well have been to blame.

Turning up at the Nurbergring, the team made a radical decision: they would compromise qualifying so as to use the maximum amount of track time to better understand why some changes were working and some were not. And good as Maldonado is, he remains, compared to Barrichello, a little unpredictable. So, needing the steady head and hands of the old man of F1, the team put the new bits onto the number one car - and then turned off KERS.

The result, on paper, was a turn up for the books because the number two driver was much quicker than his team-mate and second because on track, Rubens seemed to be having a much more difficult time with the car.

That, simply, is because he was. But with data being pored over all night, Williams expect to be able to reset the aero on Barrichello's car ahead of the race and to turn on KERS. They are allowed to do that kind of work on the car because they did not qualify in the top ten.

Maldonado will also get settings based on the comparison of his and Rubino's outings in qualifying.

Whether it works will all be visible within the first ten minutes of the race as the back markers, on their soft rubber, will try to be leaping on the apparently vulnerable Williams cars.