Lowe: Williams reached bottom of the trench performance in 2018

Williams chief technical officer Paddy Lowe believes his team reached the "bottom of the trench", performance-wise last season.

The British team finished 10th out of 10 in the constructors' championship, the worst in its history, with the FW41 being a poor invention from the Williams engineers.

Lance Stroll and Segrey Sirotkin only managed to record seven points between them, after a season before that saw the team pick up four podium places, and a top five finish for Williams.

"It's been a very tough season for the team, but also for me personally, I would say one of the toughest years that I'd had in Formula 1," Lowe explained to Autosport. 

"Certainly in the middle of it, as different players started to appreciate what we are dealing with, it was a sort of slow realisation. That was a really, really tough time. But on the good side, I think we found the bottom of the trench in terms of performance.

"That is actually a healthy process for the team to go through for the long-term."

With the FW41 being so flawed; Williams launched an investigation into why it performed the way it did. Deputy team principal Claire Williams confirmed this, describing it as an "interrogation".

"It has not been the best year for us, certainly not one that we were either hoping for or expecting," she said. "We obviously went down some pretty wrong roads and that would probably be an understatement."