Williams Racing are first to share onboard from a 2022 F1 car in action at Silverstone with Nicholas Latifi driving the FW44.
Williams has shared first onboard video of the 2022 F1 car with Latifi driving around the Silverstone circuit in promotional wet tyres. The video is just less than three minutes short which doesn’t really showcase the lap time as the car left the pits.
The onboard shows the flaps over the large front tyres, while the large body around the cockpit area could be ascertained too. After his run, Latifi spoke to written media where he opened up more about his run and the visibility factor.
“The visibility, it definitely is worse in some corners,” said Latifi. “I guess it just depends on the kind of corner, how much you are steering into the corner and where your gaze is going. I think that’ll just be something that everyone has to get used to. But there are definitely instances where you do see less for sure. In terms of initial feelings, I guess it’s quite unlucky that two years in a row for me that the shakedown is in the lovely wet weather at Silverstone.
“So it’s not ideal because myself, I’m not going to be at the limit, because it’s your first time back in the car, you definitely don’t want to make any silly mistakes and damage the car. It’s wet, the tyres still don’t really offer a lot of grip in the wet, the full wet tyre. It’s really tricky to get any kind of proper feeling of the car. It definitely feels very different to last year for sure. Feels like you’re driving a heavier car.
“But beyond that, I was nowhere near the limits. We’re kind of just making sure everything’s running, making sure the seat’s comfortable and any little adjustments we want to make on that. So besides that, I’m not really reading too much into anything else that I felt,” summed up Latifi.
Teammate Alexander Albon who had his first-ever run in a Williams F1 car added his view about driving the FW44 at Silverstone. “It was wet for us so maybe a little bit harder to compare to from previous years,” he started. But honestly, it feels like a racing car! It feels pretty decent out of the box. It’s hard to say with the promo tyres and, and a lovely wet track in the UK, but it all feels pretty normal. Nothing stand out at the moment.
“I think once we get towards the latter end of testing, when we start seeking the true gains with the car, putting it on its limits, then we’ll really see what the car is like on the limit. But I can say for now especially today, both Nicky and I weren’t pushing that hard. We had kind of the worst of it with a dark, gloomy, wet day at Silverstone, but it wasn’t too bad.
“I think we’re going to struggle more when we go to street tracks. When we come towards Monaco, Baku Jeddah, that’s going to be the tricky ones. On open tracks, you can see far ahead of you. With the blind spots of the tyre and all the deflectors, it takes away a lot of that immediate view as you’re looking into the corner. So what you end up doing is you’re looking actually further around the corner.
“However, on a street track, obviously past a wall, there’s only more wall, so you can’t see much around it. I think that’s going to be the tricky one. And also combat driving, I think, that’s also going to be something a little bit trickier to see where you are, where the front wing is and where your tyres are. That might be a little bit more tricky,” summed up Albon.
Here’s full link: https://www.williamsf1.com/posts/2c5864f4-976b-433e-a7c6-39986ae4100b/watch-nicholas-latifi-first-lap-onboard-fw44
https://twitter.com/WilliamsRacing/status/1495405630487736325?s=20&t=MT9Pw2WdTIjU8xPbfe-UzA
Here’s Nicholas Latifi on aftermath of Abu Dhabi
Here’s first shots of Williams on track
Here’s the Williams launch
Here’s shakedown list: