It’s not under-reported this last couple of weeks that Williams F1 team have failed to impress the paddock and fans alike in 2019 – an underprepared campaign starting 2019 late to the first test in Barcelona.

TJ13 exclusively reported on one of the reasons why Williams were late to the party, a source close to the team emailed the site explaining how the upper management tried to sack most of the team’s managerial staff last year, only for that action to bite them in the arse.

Late on Monday last week, TJ13 received an anonymous email from an internal source within Grove. To quote:

“At the end of last year, all the managers in all manufacturing departments got sacked after an internal survey.

“They all obviously appealed, and have now all been paid off with no employment restrictions.

“Upper management are now trying to implement new working hours and staff are refusing to work more than the standard shift hours in protest of any change. So not a surprise the car is late and is not at the test”

Williams promoted their reserve driver, the Polish veteran Robert Kubica, a driver with basically half an arm but a heap of talent. The Pole nearly lost his arm during an off-season rally event in the winter of 2012, effectively ending his F1 career until now.

Kubica has been praised over the years for not only a natural talent that has touted him as a potential world champion by many, but also his intelligence and knack for engineering. Kubica is known for his technical proficiency and engineering knowledge, a discipline he’s purposely pursued in the quest to be the best driver in the world.

During an interview today at Barcelona, Claire Williams described this ability from Kubica as their main resource at this stage of the Williams team 2019 campaign.

“The knowledge he [Kubica] has is phenomenal, he could be a technical director” claims the daughter of Sir Frank.

This could be indeed true, but perhaps Claire had better listen to her new technical directors appraisal of the new Williams Fw42 car, and consider swapping out Kubica for Paddy Lowe, for the single armed Pole might stand a better chance at completing their car in time for the crucial and limited testing period allocated to the teams each season.

Indeed many fingers have been pointed at the ex-Mercedes technical chief for being one of the primary reasons the team were late to testing last week with some ill fitting components requiring last minute manufacturing.

Indeed Kubica describes the situation as a mess, saying “The lost time can not be made up.” when summarising the team situation in week two of testing.

On the sixth Barcelona test day Robert Kubica was finally able to complete a productive test day with the FW42. The Pole circulated around the 4.655 km Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya 130 times and explained afterwards:

“Yes, that was finally a normal test day. Unfortunately, we are a bit late with the test program because we were late last week. The feelings are mixed, because on the one hand we are happy about the many rounds. But it’s not that long until the first race is over and we’re not where we want to be. ”

“We’ve collected a lot of data and tried different things, but we’re just starting from a driver’s point of view and still have many things to figure out. However, time is running out. I hope that in the next two days we can play around a bit more with the car and see how the car reacts to different situations and things. ”

“The goal remains the same, I will try to do my best and do my job, whatever is required of me,” continues the 34-year-old. “Ultimately, there are priorities and, of course, it does not help if we travel to Australia for the season opener with few test kilometers. I just have to make sure I make the most of the cockpit time left to me before the GP in Melbourne, both to improve the feeling and deepen my understanding of the car. ”

And with what result would Kubica be satisfied in Melbourne? “The biggest achievement is that if I finish the weekend knowing I did a good job regardless of the outcome, because we probably will not be able to fight for the results that people might expect from us. Usually I am very honest with myself and I also expect a lot from myself. ”

Testing continues tomorrow and Friday this week before the season opener in Melbourne in a few weeks time.