STUART CODLING
“The woeful FW41 is getting worse”
The sorry plight of the once-great Williams team is no joy to recount. It’s a measure of the affection in which everybody holds ‘Team Willy’ that while certain other outfits have plunged into the doldrums and been given a good kicking by fans and the media, Williams’ fall from grace is one car crash from which most of us have averted our eyes.
It was at Silverstone in 1979 that Clay Regazzoni won Williams’ first grand prix after Alan Jones claimed the team’s first ever pole position - by a crushing 0.6s. It was here in 1985 that, during qualifying, Keke Rosberg wrestled his FW11 to a new Formula 1 speed record: the first lap exceeding an average of 160mph. Rosberg’s record would stand as the fastest lap of all time for another 17 years until another Williams driver broke it, albeit at Monza: Juan Pablo Montoya. What to make of the mess now? “In order to effect change,” said deputy team principal Claire Williams at Silverstone, “you need to make changes and you need to make some hard decisions. We’re going through that process at the moment but it’s not a case of rushing into it.
“Sometimes when you rush in you can make decisions you don’t want to make and end up regretting those decisions. We’re undertaking a full evaluation of our internal structures and processes at the moment.
“We haven’t completed that work yet, so we don’t have any news to announce. But it’s mostly about identifying the talent that we do have in-house. We have a lot of great people at Williams that are working really hard at the moment in this difficult situation that we’re in.”
Chief designer Ed Wood and head of aero Dirk de Beer have already gone – the latter not very long after slipping his feet under the desk. What must be most galling for the legions of Williams fans out there is that the woeful FW41 is getting worse rather than better as successive upgrades either fail to deliver the anticipated improvements or actually make it worse.
At Silverstone both cars had to start from the pitlane when the team reverted to a previous spec of rear wing overnight. During qualifying, both drivers had been dumped into the kitty litter when they disengaged the DRS and the airflow around the rear wing and floor remained stalled. That’s a 60 per cent loss of downforce.
Technical director Paddy Lowe revealed on Saturday that he had apologised to both drivers for “not giving them the equipment they needed”. That’s headline news in Russia, by the way.
Perhaps Lance and Sergey could have borrowed a response from one of Paddy’s illustrious predecessors, who once hissed to Antonio Pizzonia down the team radio: “Whatever it is that you do… do it better!”