It was a hard fought weekend for a solitary point, but the AT&T Williams team stuck to their task with dedication after a difficult start to the race meeting on Friday.

Significant engineering work on Friday night and a committed qualifying performance from Nico Rosberg enabled the team to stay in contention for a points finish in a race that saw many fancied runners falling by the wayside.

“We got absolutely the maximum out of today and so I am not so unhappy with the result,” Nico said. “Even though the car was not good at all on Friday, we moved it forward and had a reasonable qualifying. We built on this with a good start to the race and claimed another point finishing in 8th place. It is more than I could have hoped for at the beginning of the weekend. The car was difficult to drive today and it had a lot to do with the tyres. When the sun came out, the tyres worked well, especially the soft tyres in the final stint. In these conditions, I was able to push more.”

The team’s focus will now be on technical solutions to improve low drag performance for the circuit characteristics at Monza, the venue for the Italian Grand Prix in a fortnight, in order to build on an unbroken eight race run of points finishes.

“This wasn’t a competitive race for us, but at least we scored a point and Nico fought well for his position,” said Sam Michael. “We were competitive at various points today but not over the race distance. What is clear is that on the low drag tracks we are not as competitive as on the normal high downforce circuits and we have a similar race in two weeks time, so we will be putting some energy towards being able to score more points in Italy.”