There has been troubles on and off for the former Formula 1 world champion team Williams this season. With Martini pulling out of its sponsorship from the 2019 season and no big sponsors signed yet, financially the team is scrapping for a settled budget.
On-track results have been hard to come by as well which puts off potential sponsors and a lower championship position further hurts the team in getting a respectable prize money from the Formula One Management.
The team has struggled for results on-track as they face co-relation troubles from the windtunnel to the track which resulted in just the four points from the first six races. It is also having to handle two relatively new drivers Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirtokin.
However, Claire Williams says the team is not ‘writing off’ the season as yet as they work behind the scenes to solve the issues, particularly on the aerodynamics side. “We’ve never said we’re going to write this season off,” she said.
“In no way would we ever say that at Williams. We’re only a third of the way through this year. There are a lot of races left to go. We haven’t done what we wanted to do in the first third – scoring four points is not where we want to be.
“But the guys are doing a good job, as I said. But it does require a little bit of patience. It’s not easy turning things around that fast. We’ve got a lot of work to do, particularly on the aerodynamics side of things, and that takes time.
“So we’ll be bringing updates to forthcoming races, we’ll have to see how they pan out. It’s just a case of working hard and keeping everything crossed so that we deliver the performance that we need to do, so that by the end of the year we’re back up to the front of the field, but that’s going to be hard work for us.”
The team’s technical chief Paddy Lowe has stressed in the races gone by on the recovery plan put in place. He echoed Williams’ sentiments that it does take time to find the cause and then implement the cure during the season with lack of testing.
While their race drivers lack the experience, they have Robert Kubica to bring in the expertise – but the Polish driver himself is trying to learn as much about the new cars and tyres, both of which is a lot more different to what he used to drive.
Amid this, the team lost two capable members in a space of a month with Chief Designer Ed Wood leaving first, followed by Head of Aerodynamics Dirk De Beer. Despite the losses, Williams says she has faith in the technical team to deliver solid results in the future.
“We’re obviously having quite a difficult start to our year but we have a really strong technical team in place back at Grove who are working really hard and really cohesively, and that’s the most important thing, and everyone just has their heads down and is trying to get us out of the trouble we’re in at the moment,” she said.