The Williams F1 team has suffered a nightmare first half to the 2018 season – and chief technical officer Paddy Lowe says that things aren’t likely to get much better any time soon.
A new front wing has helped some of the team’s most obvious problems. But that in turn has only exposed areas where even more work needs to be undertaken.
“As you start digging, you find more and more problems. We have to make up a lot of ground,” he told Auto Motor und Sport this week.
“In the meantime, we have to endure the pain until there is a solution,” he said. “”We hope to make some more changes after the [summer shutdown] but it won’t be half of what we need.
“It’s mainly aerodynamics but also more than that. The car lacks stability. We’ve fallen behind compared to last year,” he admitted.
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The team is also approaching the point where it must decide when to cut its losses on the current season before turning its attention fully onto development for next year’s chassis.
“We’re hoping for a better second half before we concentrate fully on the 2019 car,” he said.
The current situation at Williams has been compared to a similar situation that Lowe faced when he grappled with a fundamentally flawed car at McLaren in 2009.
“It’s not directly comparable,” Lowe insisted. “But it shows that if everyone works purposefully, with discipline and while staying calm and united, you can pull out of it.
“In the end it’s a technical problem, and all technical problems are solvable,” he insisted.
Williams has been criticised for selecting an inexperienced driver line-up this season, which might have affected the development of the FW41.
Lance Stroll is only in his second year at Grove, while Sergey Sirotkin remains pointless in his rookie season after replacing the veteran Felipe Massa over the winter.
But Lowe was doubtful that having a driver even of Massa’s vast F1 experience would have made any difference to the team’s current predicament.
“It’s better for any team to have two multiple world champions,” he conceded. “But our problems have nothing to do with the inexperience of our drivers.
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“They’re doing a good job in a difficult situation. The car would not be better if we had other drivers.”
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