WILLIAMS FW41

When the Williams FW41 was unveiled in a trendy east London ‘art space’ earlier this year, the signs were good. Well, rather than ‘unveiled’, but it was more a case of an image being projected onto the brick wall of a Shoreditch basement, and perhaps therein lies the problem.

The image thus displayed was of a car more aerodynamically in line with the Ferrari that had showed reasonably well throughout the previous season. On the face of it, a far better prospect than the low-downforce design concept the team had been pursuing with diminishing returns since 2014.

But you only had to watch from trackside at Barcelona’s Turn 3 in pre-season to grasp the awful truth. For lap after lap, Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin grappled gamely with the twitching and spasming of the wretched device as it made successive bids to spear itself into the barrier.

And the car got little better throughout the year. A new (and less complex) front wing made it slightly less edgy, but at Silverstone Williams had to junk a new rear wing because the airflow wouldn’t reattach when the DRS closed. By season’s end the team seemed no nearer to understanding why the car was so bad.

They might be better off Shoreditching the whole lot and starting again.