“We have put in place…a recovery programme to bring back the performance.”
Williams are having yet another poor season. They are at the bottom of the Constructors’ Championship. They are going into Monaco Grand Prix after enduring a very difficult weekend at Spain. Once a dominant team which won 9 World Championships, it is disheartening to see them perform poorly.
Irrespective of circuits, Williams have one issue or the other to fix. After a difficult race at Barcelona Williams’ technical head Paddy Lowe said, “I think what we’ve seen is that the issues we have are better and worse at different circuits.”
On tight and twisty circuits of Monaco he said, “Monaco will be another thing altogether. I’m not going to predict where that lands, we’ll have to see.”
The team which had impressive seasons in 2014 and 2015 have struggled since and, this despite the fact that they have Mercedes powered engine beneath the chassis. The lack of performance from a car that houses the most successful engine of the hybrid era is baffling.
“We all carry responsibility. The car isn’t good enough, it’s not what it should be,” said Lowe in Barcelona.
“There are some issues with it, which fortunately we think we understand and we’re very busy doing a lot of work to fix those issues.
“We’re not writing off this season,” he added further.
On lack of pace he said, “You see the pace is really quite bad. There are many things that are good about the car and they are unable to show themselves because the car is let down by one particular aspect.”
Do they expect things to change this season?
To this he said, “We have put in place…a recovery programme to bring back the performance, bring back the car to the level at which we intended to operate and that programme is timed up to the mid-season point.
“We just lost our way in some critical areas which we now understand.”
Williams had last won in Monaco in 2003. While they can’t win here this season but, they must be hoping for a better finish from here onward to stall their downward trend. They must be praying for some positives as these are impacting their commercial side of business too. Martini will no longer be their title sponsor at the end of this year and they must have something under their belt to show to their prospective sponsors.
Shortly after arriving at Williams, Paddy was asked what he missed about MB…
The only thing I do miss is – and I remembered the other day – I decided I’m an addict of purples. When you see the purples pop up on the screen, it actually kind of encapsulates what, what we’re here for. That is it. When you send a car out there that you’ve helped to develop with a driver that can wring its neck and the purples start popping up, that is a Formula 1 engineer’s ultimate raison d’etre and that’s where the pleasure comes.
Good on him for going cold turkey.
Kudos.
Getting part ownership in Williams probably helped get rid of the DT’s………..