Roy Nissany to Drive in French FP1 For Williams

Williams have announced that Roy Nissany will participate in FP1 in Friday Practice at French Grand Prix this weekend.

Nissany will drive George Russell’s FW43B in the opening Practice session at Circuit Paul Ricard with Head of Vehicle Performance, Dave Robson commenting: “As usual, Roy will take an active role in our engineering programme, further evaluating some of the components that we introduced in Azerbaijan.”

Robson also noted that Nissany’s experience of this circuit in junior categories combined with feeling of the Williams car will help the team understand their upgrades in further details with Nicholas Latifi following a similar programme in FP1 mixing component testing and race preparation.

This weekend also marks the first of a triple-header with two races at Austria’s Red Bull Ring to follow in the next two weekends, which Robson believes will be ‘demanding’ for Williams but is confident of extracting maximum performance at two different circuits.

Russell meanwhile retired in Baku, Azerbaijan, with a gearbox failure upon the race restart after a red flag but is ‘looking forward’ to get back racing again after spending the weekend off enjoying the British sunshine as the season continues to ‘hot up.’

British summer does exist. And it’s great! 🇬🇧❤️ pic.twitter.com/BqvKkD9OE4

— George Russell (@GeorgeRussell63) June 13, 2021

Latifi meanwhile is keen to get back into the car after enjoying two positive weekends of ‘strong performances’ in Monaco and Baku, saying: “I’ll definitely be looking to keep that momentum as we move on to Paul Ricard.

“It’s quite a different track to those we have just been at, so I’m curious to see how the car performs around a more conventional circuit.”

This race weekend will also mark Williams’ first race following a managerial restructure at the team as Simon Roberts stood down as Team Principal, with Jost Capito taking up the position.