Williams aims for mid season recovery

The start of the 2018 Formula One season would see the Williams Martini team struggle with a 2018 FW41 that was far from meeting the teams expectations. But there appeared to be small improvements been made but come the 2018 Spanish Grand Prix the short comings of the FW41 were even more clear to see.

For Williams' Chief Technical Officer Paddy Lowe the results coming from the practice and qualifying sessions for the Spanish race were difficult to defend. After having seen both Williams drivers qualify slowest Lowe would comment to the media in the simplest way possible by saying that the performance of the team’s FW41 was ‘bad’

Lowe commented: “You see the pace is really quite bad. This is because this is something that is really disrupting the drivers’ ability to drive the car anywhere near the limit. There are many things that are good about the car and they are not able to show themselves because the car is let down by some particular aspects.”

Lowe believes Williams’s weaknesses are enhanced by the nature of the Barcelona circuit. He added: “There are some issues with the car, which fortunately we think we understand. We’re very busy doing a lot of work to fix those issues. But none of those fixes are in place today, unfortunately. Which is why we were struggling so much at a circuit which is a really unforgiving track, I would say, for underlying car performance.”

But Lowe also made it very clear that the Williams team was aiming to bring the FW41's performance up to its intended level by ‘mid season’. This will be achieved by a development strategy to recover which aims to improve the cars performance. But he was realistic enough to say that this process may take until the middle of the season before it is achieved

“We’ve put in place a programme with the team, which we call a recovery programme, to bring back the performance of the car to a level that we intended it to operate,” Lowe explains. “That programme is timed up to the mid season point.” But beyond that he would not give a date or race at which he felt the necessary changes will see an improvement.