The Williams F1 team isn’t planning on hiring any new senior management and technical staff in the immediate future according to deputy team principal Claire Williams.
The most recent addition to the behind-the-scenes line-up was the appointment of former McLaren chief operating officer Simon Roberts as the new managing director at Grove.
Roberts has been brought in to help Williams enact its recovery plan, after a dismal 2019 season left them firmly at the back of the F1 grid.
- Williams recruits McLaren COO Simon Roberts as new managing director
But Williams says that Roberts’ hiring completes the new senior team structure that will be in place for the current campaign.
“Simon is a fantastic addition to the team and we’re really excited,” she said. “He’s obviously got a fantastic background.
“His role will coordinate between technical and operations. That’s the role that we’re excited by, and we think Simon’s going to do a really great job in.”
Before Roberts was signed up by Williams, the team also had been busy bolstering the rest of its technical department.
“We have also strengthened our technical team, following a period of restructuring last year that we undertook,” Motorsport.com reports Williams as saying this week.
“David Warner has come in as our chief designer and Jonathan Carter has come in from Renault as our deputy chief designer and head of design.
“for us at the moment, the structure is as we have always wanted it to be. We’re very happy with it and we’re going to let it play its course and play out.
“We think it will do a good job,” she added. “There will are no plans right here, right now to be bringing any further people into our engineering side of the business.”
After taking a heavy financial hit in its most recent annual report, the team is looking at ways of securing new investment in order to carry on. It hasn’t ruled out selling part or all of the team to a new investor.
More money could help the team add more resources to its technical and engineering departments in the future, but Williams insisted that any extra funds would likely be spent on improving infrastructure.
“I don’t necessarily believe that we need to invest in personnel at a senior level,” she said. “Whether we need more people in the ranks below, that will be a question that we will look at.
“But we have plans. I don’t want to go into detail on them, but that’s what the investment will be used for.
“With F1 teams you give them money to spend and they’ll spend it straightaway,” Williams acknowledged. “You give it to engineers and they spend it even faster, and they want even more!”
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