Williams: 2018 car would've been bad "even if we tripled the budget"

Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams believes her team's car in 2018 was so bad that it wouldn't have been competitive even if the team had tripled its budget, as the Grove-based outfit finished in last place by quite a long way in the constructors' championship.

With a completely new line-up at Williams and new regulations set to take force in the F1 in 2019, the road to recovery could be on its way for the British team. After scoring just seven points in 21 races in 2018 and finishing in the lowest place in the team's history, things can't get much worse.

“I think the problems were related to the global car, if you like – we’ve had issues front to back,” Williams explained to Motorsport.com.

“So to try and make changes to bring performance to a car that was like that was always going to be difficult.

“We tried and we tried hard. It wasn’t through a lack of hard work, energy, motivation, I suppose it was just the flaws were too fundamental to rectify halfway through a season.

“I think even regardless of the amount of budget we could have thrown at it – we threw a lot of budget at it, even if we had tripled it I’m not convinced we would have changed its course.”

Williams is convinced the tide will turn at the team as the many problems at the team and on the FW41 have all been identified, but she does warn to keep expectations realistic for now.

“Changes are always a good thing, it resets a balance, but I think in order to make a significant difference you need those changes to bed in for a while.

“As I’ve said repeatedly you don’t go from P5 to P10 without quite a few things that have gone wrong in your organisation and we are in the slow process of resolving all of those issues.

“We have 650 people in our team but I think we are still resource limited when it comes to people to fix the mass of problems that we have. We can’t tackle everything all in one go.

“So we therefore have to temper those expectations as to what we can achieve in 2019 based on the resources we have to fix everything.”

One thing's for sure - with George Russell and Robert Kubica, Williams have an extremely talented line-up in 2019, and a healthy balance between experience and talent at the team. Can they right the ship in 2019?