Like their rivals McLaren, another British team Williams is having a nightmare run in the 2018 Formula 1 season as it sits last in the standings with only the four points.
McLaren lost its team principal Eric Boullier earlier this week ahead of the British Grand Prix weekend, while Williams had two of its key team members Dirk De Beer and Ed Wood dismissed in the last two months.
The Grove-based outfit is amid a disastrous run where it could finish last in the constructors’ standings – losing chunks of money and with its key sponsor Martini also leaving the team after 2018, it has only made the team’s life tougher even more.
After a high-profile casualty seen in McLaren, there could be some movements within Williams as well with team boss Claire Williams admitting that they are ready to take some ‘hard decisions’ to improve. However, they won’t rush into it just yet.
“It’s a very similar story [to McLaren] that is going on at Williams at the moment,” said Williams. “We’re in fairly similar positions. Of course in order to effect change, you need to make changes and you need to make some hard decisions.
“We’re going through that process at the moment but it’s not a case of rushing into it. Sometimes when you rush in you can make decisions you don’t want to make and end up regretting those decisions.
“We’re undertaking a full evaluation of our internal structures and processes at the moment. We haven’t completed that work yet, so we don’t have any news to announce. But it’s mostly about identifying the talent that we do have in-house.
“We have a lot of great people at Williams that are working really hard at the moment in this difficult situation that we’re in. So it’s focusing on that, focusing on the good that we have and then seeing whether we need to augment that talent, augment that resource we have and then move forward from there,” she explained.
Explaining into the issues the team has faced this year, Williams said that while aerodynamics has been a problem but when finding solutions to it, the team unlocked some more weaknesses of the car which means further work to sort them out.
They have had some upgrades put on the car in Silverstone this weekend and are waiting to see the results if they have helped them to recover. Also, one of the reasons for them to be 10th is the improvements made by Sauber, Toro Rosso and Haas.
“There are a variety of reasons as to why we found ourselves in tenth,” she started. “You don’t get to tenth without having a number of issues. I think it’s probably clear to see that our aerodynamic package is probably the key to that.
“And unlocking the issues we have around the aero performance of our car is going to be critical to moving us forward. As we’ve gone through this recovery programme, we’ve identified a number of other weaknesses within the car and the team itself.
“I think as you go through that analysis invariably you always find other fires that you’ve got to put out. To be fair, it’s probably been a very useful exercise from that perspective, to go through that process and identify all your weaknesses, which we decided we were going to do when we realised the car wasn’t where we needed it to be after testing.
“And that’s going to give us an opportunity to actually make greater steps forward for us. But it is a long road. I think Zak [Brown] was talking about two to ten years earlier. This isn’t going to be the work of a moment for us, unfortunately.
“With the environment, as well that they’re operating in, in Formula One at the moment. The teams that were weaker than us last year have suddenly catapulted ahead of us, and they’ve made great in-roads for a number of reasons.
“And those are challenges to us, being an independent team now in this sport is a very different world now to face than that which we were facing a few years ago. From a cost perspective, inevitably, this situation in which we find ourselves is going to have ramifications for us financially.
“Not least the prize-fund money we’ll receive for taking home tenth place will be considerably less than our forecasted P5. We lose Martini as our title partner at the end of this year. As much as we were expecting that and can budget for it, it still leaves a hole and finding sponsors when you’re in P10 is not going to be an easy piece of work for us.
“We had to spend additional money as well, in order to activate our recovery programme. It’s not easy but we’ve got some very clever people working within that realm at the moment.
“We have a great CEO, we have a brilliant CFO who are doing everything they can to make sure we have a strong and healthy budget to go racing and compete successfully next year – but it’s not an easy world at Williams at the moment,” he explained.
The former world champion team has a rich history and heritage for long which is why Williams is particularly distressed to see the ‘incredibly difficult’ run for the team, but she agrees that every outfit goes through such patch and hopes that it can once again thrive in the sport.
