Williams will not give up JUNE 5, 2018 Williams is not giving up, despite sitting dead last in 2018. The once-dominant British team has hit the skids this year as inexperienced drivers Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin struggle with a poor car. Team deputy Claire Williams denies Williams took too much risk with its 2018 design. "We did not approach the season thinking we were going to win," she told La Presse. "We are not naive. We all know deep down that competing with Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull - with the constant progress they make, with the budgets, the staff and all the resources they have - is a colossal challenge," Williams said. "I think we had realistic goals, so to speak now of immense disappointment would be an understatement. But it's not the end of the world. It's sport and all teams have ups and down. "Now we have to dig a little deeper, work harder, make the changes where they are needed and move forward," added Williams. Williams denies that being a new mother is complicating her task of leading the team out of crisis. "It's difficult, but I'm not the first mother to hold an important position and those who preceded me did well," she said. "It's mostly a question of organisation and time management." And so she said her sporting priority is to lead Williams out of its current situation. "It's the way you react to a situation that makes the difference," said Williams. "It's not going well? You shake off the dust and move forward, preparing for the next race, the next season. "We will fight. Be sure of that." Williams said she is confident in Williams' technical boss Paddy Lowe, even after two of his crucial deputies, Ed Wood and Dirk de Beer, recently left. "We have a very clear plan of what to fix," she said. "Some changes will be made quickly, others will take longer. But we know where we are going and I can assure you that our ambitions remain very high."
Make a play for Newey - doubt they have the resources to get him, but seeing them so far down is really a bummer.
Newey has been at Williams already and left in acrimony; I don't think he wants to repeat the experience. Anyway, I think that Williams is reaching the end of the line. The team may find a buyer with large pockets. It was the apparently the 3rd most successful team in the history of F1.
Gosh, how bad is Williams leadership? TheIr whole mindset is wrong. They are thinking and acting like tail end Charlies. Unsurprisingly, they are achieving this vision easily. If you aspire to be mediocre in business then that’s what you will achieve. Where’s the ambition? The team needs to be sold to an outfit that can bring fresh thinking and proper investment.
Must be time now for Claire to finally move aside, with the new kid etc ..F1 is a 24/7 24 hrs a day big biz. Problem is who would they put in there to replace her?
No team is worth buying. The formula is a joke. Freeze the motors now for 2 years is a new proposal. So more of the same? No new idea's for new circuits but street one's. New motor to be simplified yet the real issue of a major aero update to actually have racing is no where to be seen. F1 is losing fans because as an entity it has no vision just like Williams.
I only see an outside big manufacturer buying Williams. Like VAG group, maybe not Porsche, but perhaps Audi? On the otherhand VAG group is spending $50Billion on electric/hybrid cars in the next 7 years or so. I'm not sure what value a big investment in F1 would have on their road ICE engines. Probably better for them to be in Formula E.
What's up with Williams? Analysing the F1 great's struggles in 2018 Williams have had a troubled start to 2018 Credit: ACTION PLUS Luke Slater 11 June 2018 • 11:12am Williams are one of Formula One's most successful teams. In fact, the third most successful team in the sport's history, behind Ferrari and McLaren. Nine constructors' championships, seven drivers' championships, 114 wins and countless podiums. Those are the bare facts. Their glory days challenging for titles are gone. Their last race victory was Pastor Maldonado's unexpected win in the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix. That was their first triumph for nearly eight years. But it was as recently as 2015 that the team were regularly challenging for podiums. In 2015 and 2014 they finished third in the constructors' championship, comfortably beating Ferrari (2014) and Red Bull (2015) in the process. Two more middling seasons in 2016 and 2017 left them in fifth place in the standings but, after four years of solid revival, Williams are now the slowest car on the grid and sit last in the standings after seven races. To see this decline has been painful. The 2018 season is just seven races old but the moments of ignominy have been many and varied. Drivers Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin have progressed from the first part of qualifying just four times out of a possible 14 between them. A third of the season has gone and just four points have been scored. Progress has been non-existent. What has happened? Is it as bad as it looks? And can they engineer themselves out of this rut this season or even the next? The car: slow and unstable The FW41 in all its glory Credit: GETTY IMAGES The 2018 FW41 was intended to be a more balanced package. Since the start of the turbo hybrid era in 2014, their cars have thrived on low-downforce power-dependent circuits, with help from a Mercedes engine, but have struggled on the tighter higher-downforce tracks. Take 2015, for instance, a season where the team finished third in the constructors' championship. Williams scored points in every single race except for the USA - where both cars retired - and the highest downforce circuits on the calendar: Monaco and Hungary. The recruitment of Mercedes' Paddy Lowe last year - who had a hand in designing the Silver Arrows' championship-winning cars from 2014-2016 - was a big coup. Lowe announced a new aerodynamic concept for 2018. Testing didn't tell us all that much, other than that they were struggling. But within a few races we began to see just how big the problem was. In Melbourne, the Wantage-based outfit were only ahead of the struggling Sauber. In Bahrain they were slowest, and in China they were only ahead of Sauber again. Azerbaijan was a vast improvement, with the FW41 being the sixth quickest car. Lance Stroll drove well to take the team's first points of the year with an eighth place among the carnage in front of him. The Baku City circuit is an atypical configuration, consisting of one very long straight - where their Mercedes power is an advantage - and 90 degree turns followed by short straights. A "point-and-squirt" track where their issues were not as exposed. Spain, though, was a bump down to earth, with both cars qualifying at the back of the grid, Stroll nearly four seconds down on Lewis Hamilton's pole time. In percentage terms, Williams were 4.6 per cent off the absolute pace, the largest performance differential of the year for any team. In Spain, the biggest performance gap between any team and the next closest was between Williams and Sauber. Monaco was little better, despite an impressive performance by Sirotkin in qualifying. Both drivers had awful races. Stroll suffered two punctures and Sirotkin was handed a 10-second stop/go penalty before the race had begun, ruining any chances of points. In Canada, again, Williams were miles away in qualifying. The race was no better. Stroll retired on the first lap and Sirotkin was last of the classified runners. In 2018 the average percentage gap between Williams and Ferrari, the leading team on raw pace, is 3.2 per cent. Sauber's gap, by comparison, is 2.9 per cent. Toro Rosso, seventh in the standings, have a 2.5 per cent gap. This, perhaps, makes things seem a little rosier than the reality. The lack of progress from Melbourne should be the most worrying aspect. The team are not moving closer to the front or even their rivals at the back. What, then, are the problems with the FW41? How is it possible for a team to take a backward step this big despite recruiting one of F1's brightest minds? The biggest issue comes down to corner entry and car stability. Without this, the drivers have little confidence going into the corners, something that even an F1 novice could understand is a big problem. Claire Williams has been bullish in the face of her team's problems Credit: ACTION PLUS Team consultant and ex-F1 driver Alexander Wurz believes the problem comes down to an aerodynamic stall at the diffuser, stating that this area had been a problem for Williams for a while but that this worsened significantly in 2018. Reserve driver Robert Kubica, who drove the FW41 in practice in Spain, was fairly uncomplimentary about his machine, describing it as "hard work". "Unfortunately now we are in a position that we are going around the track and we are not driving the car. And this is not enjoyable," he said. Wurz also said that a lack of "correlation" - how the car behaves in wind tunnel simulations against how it behaves on track, in the real world - has been partly to blame. In March, Lowe described the correlation as "pretty sound" but has since been honest in his assessment of the car and his own performance. "I haven’t done a good enough job in making the right level of progress. I’ve been with the team 12 months, and there are things which we should have responded to earlier."
The drivers: talented but inexperienced and inconsistent Lance Stroll has had a difficult second season for Williams but remains their only driver to score points in 2018 Credit: GETTY IMAGES Formula One races are not run in the wind tunnel, though, and drivers are a crucial part of the performance equation. The line-up of Stroll and rookie Sirotkin has attracted as much criticism. A lot of it unfair. This is Williams's most inexperienced and, some have argued, worst driver line-up for quite some time. Does this really stack up? Not really. Looking at experience, it is not too far off their 2013 line-up of rookie Valtteri Bottas and Pastor Maldonado, who then had then completed two seasons in F1. Perhaps inexperience is part of the problem? In 2013 Williams also struggled. They didn't score their first point until the tenth race of the season in Hungary and scored only five points in the entire season. Would more experienced drivers have done better then or now? Probably. But how much better, exactly? Would they be above Sauber in the standings? Perhaps. But any better seems very unlikely. The team also only scored five points in the entirety of the 2011 season, with the experienced race winner Rubens Barrichello and a quick but unpredictable Maldonado. Look at how McLaren fared in 2015 with a dog of a car piloted by the outstanding talents of Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button. Both cars had critical but different, issues. McLaren's was with their Honda power unit but Williams' is with their chassis. The flaws were fundamental, though, and impossible to escape. Take a moment to ask yourself how many points Alonso would have scored in the FW41. Remarkably, Williams in 2018 and McLaren in 2015 have astoundingly similar results in the first seven races: an eighth place and four points was the Woking team's only top 10 finish too. Yes, the 2011 grid had 24 cars and Williams' Cosworth engine was by far from the best but the results are comparable. And results are what matter. In 2011 it took until the 12th round for the team to score its fifth point. The severity of the performance gap is greater now but 2011 and 2013 were equally concerning. McLaren-Honda's wretched 2015 MP4-30 struggled similarly to Williams this season Credit: ACTION IMAGES A word of support here for the much-criticised Lance Stroll. The Canadian teenager is a target because of his father's wealth. But at the end of his debut season he fared favourably to veteran and multiple race-winner Felipe Massa. Stroll scored 40 points to Massa's 43, finishing in the points seven times to Massa's 13. The Brazilian was able to get the best from the car more often than his team-mate but that is to be expected. It was the Brazilian's 15th season. Stroll's higher points were higher: an excellent podium in Baku among all the chaos and a front-row start after a treacherous wet qualifying at Monza. Sirotkin, too, has attracted criticism because of money. The Russian is seen as a "pay driver", employed by his team because of the millions of sponsorship money he brings in from the SMP bank. Again, this assessment is a little unfair on his racing ability. Let us look at his recent racing record before he came into F1. Sirotkin completed two full seasons in GP2, the F1 feeder category, coming third both times. He scored heavily and consistently in both seasons, picking up three wins along the way. Another driver to secure consecutive third-place finishes in GP2 was Jules Bianchi. It is a fair measure of talent. Let us also remember that Williams chose him on raw pace compared to Robert Kubica following a post-season test. And he was quicker than the Pole. Of course, if you swapped the two Williams drivers for the two Ferrari, Red Bull or Mercedes drivers then, yes, the results would improve. But Williams are a team with a limited budget and money is a factor for any independent F1 team. The most truthful assessment is that their two third places in 2014 and 2015 were them massively outperforming their resources. The Russian and Canadian should not be exempt from criticism. Stroll still needs to resolve his qualifying struggles. He trails Sirotkin 5-2 this year and lost 17-2 to Massa last year. His useful habit of making up multiple places on the opening lap of a race cannot mask his lack of one-lap pace on Saturday. Sirotkin has struggled in his developing career but it must be a daunting task to learn your trade in such a problematic car. Can Williams turn it around? And when? Williams have turned it around from the back of the grid before Credit: AP What can Williams do to get themselves out of this mess? Are their 2018 struggles irreversible? And what about the next few years? Perhaps we should put things into perspective. Williams have been in a similar position before. And they have got out of it before. From 2011-2013 the team never finished higher than eighth in the standings. It is unlikely, though, that they will find significant pace for the remainder of 2018. As is the case with development in F1, you might hope an upgraded aerodynamic package will give you, say, two-tenths of a second per lap. In reality it might be only half of that. And everyone else is upgrading all the time. Progress of the magnitude that Williams need to find looks impossible. They will surely be fighting at the back for the rest of the season. The positive is that there is a lot of room for improvement - and with a tight midfield and a Mercedes engine, there should be opportunities for points. Beating Sauber could be a realistic aim, though even that seems a distant target, especially with Charles Leclerc's talents. A "recovery program" is now in place, timed up to the mid-season point. With five races in the next seven weeks, time is not on their side. Team Principal Claire Williams has said this season is not being written off but at the moment it looks unsalvageable. Lance Stroll has become a target for criticism because of his father's wealth Credit: Getty Images The biggest opportunity for them to turn this around more permanently comes with the drastic regulation changes for the 2021 season which focus on, among other things, equalising the financial balance between the teams. It is a fairly grotesque situation that the sport is currently in, with no driver outside Red Bull, Ferrari or Mercedes having won a race since early 2013 and a huge budget imbalance between them and the rest of the field. 2018 has been a big improvement on the post-2014 Mercedes dominance but the chances of a car outside the top three teams getting on the podium, let alone standing on the top step of it is slim. It was no surprise that Claire Williams said she felt like opening a bottle of champagne when she heard Liberty's post-2020 proposals. But if her team continue on their current trajectory she will need something stronger.
Stroll and this journalist forget his points in Baku were a gift and not of merit. He is not at all progressing. The author should listen to the recordings from Yas Marina last year. Pathetic. Who did Williams pay for this advert.
I think papa Strollis paying a huge sum to many pseudo-journalists like thios one or Buxton to make his son look better...but he keeps on sucking!
JV took a lot of heat for his bashing of the Stroller, and was banned from the Williams garage, but it looks like he was correct with this prediction.
Look, I don’t think he’s F1 material either...but, he should get some credit for Baku. He brought the car home...which is job #1 that very many ‘talented’ drivers didn’t manage that day. Baku...more so than Monaco...is a stay out of trouble track.
So is Canada, and look how he managed that. If Williams are serious about progressing, then they need to bench one of these twits and run Kubica. Instant .5 second+ right there.
I figured they were putting Kubica to use full time behind the scenes to develop. If he is racing would that limit his development time? The two roles don’t completely overlap I don’t think.
Let's face it, the Williams is terrible and in F1 these days, the cars are 90% of the equation . Alonso, one of the best drivers in the field can't do much in the Mclaren so to expect a rookie like Lance to excel in a lousy car is wishful thinking . He is getting way too much flak because of his father's wealth but he is still a kid and has a sharp learning curve ahead of him . I laugh at JV 's comments, arguably the most overrated WDC and the worst development driver of all time, his stint with BAR proved he knows nothing about setup and giving feedback to the engineers
I think I read it in this thread or another here, but someone said Kubica doesn't race as his insurance payout for his prior injury would require at least partial repayment if he were to do that... Williams is screwed anyway. Even if they put Vettel in the car and got feedback they probably couldn't afford to make the changes. They probably broke down crying on Sunday when Lance's car crashed just thinking about the bill to put together a new car and make new spares for the replacement.
They can get right out of it. Paddy tried something new and it’s not worked. “...it was as recently as 2015 that the team were regularly challenging for podiums. In 2015 and 2014 they finished third in the constructors' championship, comfortably beating Ferrari (2014) and Red Bull (2015) in the process. Two more middling seasons in 2016 and 2017 left them in fifth place in the standings but, after four years of solid revival, Williams are now the slowest car on the grid and sit last in the standings after seven races.” “Take 2015, for instance, a season where the team finished third in the constructors' championship. Williams scored points in every single race except for the USA - where both cars retired - and the highest downforce circuits on the calendar: Monaco and Hungary. The recruitment of Mercedes' Paddy Lowe last year - who had a hand in designing the Silver Arrows' championship-winning cars from 2014-2016 - was a big coup.” I’m genuinely more concerned about McLaren F1 team than Williams. Williams will get out of it.
Not as long as they have pay drivers in their equipment. You get what you pay for. If you want to win championships, you need a capable driver and that costs money.
Williams needs more time to fix car issues JUNE 12, 2018 Paddy Lowe says Williams' problems will still take more time to solve. Russian driver Sergey Sirotkin admitted the 2018 car was "the slowest" in the field in Canada, indicating that Williams is struggling to fix its issues. "The problems that we had in Canada are the same we have had since the beginning of the season," technical boss Paddy Lowe said. "We'll deal with them as soon as we can. They are related to aerodynamics, and the solution takes time," he added. "We understand the causes but it's still not easy to eliminate the problems." Lowe said the situation is difficult on the team, from the drivers to the mechanics and beyond. "It's a difficult time for everyone, especially the racing team at the track, because the same amount of work is done regardless of whether the car is fast or slow. "It's important to work with a good morale, and that's hard when there are obvious problems with the car," he said. Lowe also said Sirotkin and his teammate Lance Stroll "have the right attitude". "They're not lacking motivation or energy," he said. "In difficult situations, some drivers start to lose their temper and it can emotionally affect everyone," Lowe added. "I've worked with an excellent driver in particular, who won many races and more than one title, who at the end of a race would say whatever he thinks. So different drivers behave differently in this or that situation. "But this does not happen here -- I don't have to worry about it."
Kubica's arm... not good. Its pretty obvious he has very little strength and mobility in his arm and fingers. First time I've seen a movie of him in a short sleeve shirt. https://streamable.com/1cdfa
hmm...pointless in 1999 to frequent points finisher the following year to podiums the year after that I think he was a pretty good driver
