Pat Fry: The team is already preparing technical innovations

Williams technical director Pat Fry spoke about the priority tasks the team is solving during pre-season testing in Bahrain.

Q: You joined the team at the end of 2023. What was the adjustment period like?
Pat Fry: Everything went great, the last three months were very busy, I was very interested in getting to know how the team works, how they solve problems, so it was a very good period.

I joined the team in November, so I had virtually no influence on the process of creating the FW46, the new Williams car you see during our garage testing. It had already been worked out practically and I started planning for the longer term. We had to figure out what we did right, what we did wrong and what we could improve. I’m responsible for many aspects of the business, not just the car, so there was a lot to do.

Question: What are the main differences between the new car and last year’s?
Pat Fry: The most important differences are usually not visible from the outside. Engineers and designers focused mainly on those aspects that would make a car faster, and they did a good job of solving some fundamental problems during the creation of the FW46. Let’s hope this is confirmed on track.

Q: Tell us how the car work was organized at the Grove base to get everything ready in time for the start of testing in Bahrain?
Pat Fry: Since November, when I joined the team, a huge amount of work has been done at the Williams base. It’s hard to believe how much we’ve been able to do. To do everything on time, it was necessary to make enormous efforts, but I can say that we can work better – plan better, organize all processes better, and then our machine will be more efficient even in the first tests.

Q: What problems is the team solving in these tests?
Pat Fry: The main tasks to be solved in three days of testing are that we must thoroughly understand the characteristics of the FW46, to what extent its behavior on the track corresponds to the calculations made during the aerodynamic studies, and to what we have seen on the simulator.

The team is already preparing technical innovations, and if everything is in order with the correlation, we know how these innovations will perform in the future. That’s why we’re mainly talking about collecting information in general, and not about achieving certain results by completing laps.