Williams have endured a painful 2018 season up until now, as their car just doesn’t have the required performance to compete week in and week out with all the midfield teams.
The team was earlier(and probably even now) heavily criticised for signing two relatively inexperienced drivers, because they brought money into the ‘Williams’ system.
However, Claire Williams is not criticising any of her drivers for Williams’ poor showing this season. The car is to blame, according to her.
She went onto reemphasise this point by saying that even Lewis Hamilton couldn’t improve Williams’ performance.
“Put Lewis in our car, and I’m not sure he could have made a huge amount of difference.” she said, as quoted by BBC.
“I feel sorry for Lance and Sergey. The car just doesn’t have the performance.” she added.
She then went onto speak about both Stroll and Sirotkin and how a lot of unfair criticism has been hurled at the duo. According to Claire, they are more or less helpless, as they are not in a position to showcase their complete skill set with a car that is short on performance.
“Lance and Sergey are young but there is often criticism of teams for not nurturing young talent,” she said.
“They have had an enormous amount of criticism levelled at them, and that is somewhat unfair.
“They have not been able to show the talent they do have and we wouldn’t put drivers in the car if we didn’t think they had some talent. I don’t think any driver could have made that much difference to our performance.” she added.
Claire pointed out fallacies with the aerodynamic structure of the car and labelled that as the biggest reason for Williams going from P5 to P10 in the constructor’s championship.
“You don’t go from P5 to P10 without a number of issues in play,” she said.
“It is obvious our aerodynamics are not where we need them to be. That was one of the key areas we went aggressive and we got it wrong.
“But we have confidence in the team we have that they can deliver what we need them to do over the next few months this season and next year we have changing aero regulations which will hopefully reset things and provide a baseline platform we can take advantage of.
“There are other issues at play but airing your dirty laundry in public is not something we do here.
“We have a job of work to do to make sure we have the right people and processes in place and the right resources.
“The situation has given us the opportunity to dive deep and make adjustments where we need to and come out stronger in the future.” she concluded.
Williams have had the worst qualifying pace amongst all the midfield teams. According to the statistics presented by BBC, they are 0.4s off Sauber, 0.5s off Toro Rosso and 0.7s off Fernando Alonso.
Can Williams come out of this slump, with reports suggesting that they are ready to become Mercedes’ B team from next season.
Should they be satisfied with the ‘B team’ tag or should they aspire to be one of the top teams once again?
