Williams chief engineer Dave Robson admits that this year’s results have not been encouraging, largely due to the overweight nature of the FW46 chassis, but the difficulties are temporary and should not overshadow the team’s strategic objectives.
Under the leadership of James Vowles, Williams changed its approach to chassis production significantly during the off-season, although it barely managed to build two cars at the start of the championship. At the same time, the team had no spare chassis for a long time, which subsequently affected it, and only Alex Albon started at the Australian Grand Prix.
Overall, the team was hampered by the fact that the car was significantly heavier than the minimum limit allowed by the regulations, and this issue should be resolved after the summer break. According to Robson, Williams generally feels that they have made progress, but at the same time everyone has reasons to be disappointed.
“We can’t close our eyes to the fact that we’ve taken a step back, but then we have to take some important steps forward from a strategic perspective,” Racer quotes Williams’ chief engineer. “We have to make sure that this approach is justified.” But at the same time, when we watched the progress of qualifying from the pit wall, especially at the beginning of the year, we said to each other after the session: “If only the weight of our car was at the right level…”
We understood that the results were much better then. Although James said that this was the wrong attitude, there were of course times when everyone was worried… In retrospect, we have to admit that ideally we could have done things a little differently and probably started all the transformation processes a little earlier.
In general, there are reasons for concern, but I think we all look at things more broadly and understand the goal that James is leading us towards. We can say that the difficulties are temporary, but I think everyone understands: this approach will still bear fruit…
We completely rethought our approach to chassis production, but the consequences turned out to be more complex than we expected, although this chassis can ultimately be called a significant step forward.”
So far the team has only 4 points, earned by Alex Albon during the stages in Monaco and Great Britain.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
