Williams woe wounds

It has been 21 years since Williams claimed the last of its nine constructors’ championships, and a return to Formula One glory days seems just as far away for the British team.

Williams is last so far this season with just four points from 10 races after rookie Lance Stroll’s surprise eighth-place finish in Azerbaijan. It continues a downward trend after finishing ninth, eighth and ninth in the last three seasons.

“It’s heart-breaking and it’s a little bit soul-destroying,” deputy team principal Claire Harris said of the team’s decline. “This is mostly my family’s team and it’s been within our family for four decades now.”

Only Ferrari, with 16, has won more constructors’ championships than the team founded by Harris’ father, Frank Williams, in 1977.

Alan Jones of Australia and Carlos Reutemann of Argentina won the first in 1980 and second the following year. But it was in the 1990s that Williams enjoyed its hey-day, crowned when Jacques Villeneuve and Heinz-Harald Frentzen claimed the second of back-to-back titles in 1997.

Nobody in the team suspected at the time that it would be the last. Ferrari dominated over the decade that followed, then Red Bull and Mercedes took charge.

Harris, who took over her role with the team in 2013, pointed to third-place finishes in 2013-14 and fifth-place finishes in 2015-16 as encouraging signs, though she was at a loss to explain the team’s current predicament.

 “We must look at this as just a trough,” she said. “Every team in any sport goes through those moments. Personally, it’s incredibly difficult to see the team go through this.”

The 19-year-old Stroll, a former Ferrari Driver Academy member, and the 22-year-old Russian driver Sergey Sirotkin, who replaced the retiring Felipe Massa, have both been struggling with the car, which has proved even worse than last year’s.

Former F1 ace and reserve driver Robert Kubica, was reported as suggesting Williams’ 2018 car’s biggest strength was its paint job. It was a joke that sadly had a ring of truth.

“The teams that were weaker than us last year have suddenly catapulted ahead of us, and they’ve made great in-roads for a number of reasons,” Harris said.

She added the challenges facing the team are greater now than they were before, in part due to the consistently poor results.

“This situation in which we find ourselves is going to have ramifications for us financially. Not least the prize-fund money we’ll receive for taking home 10th place will be considerably less,” Harris said. “We lose Martini as our title partner at the end of this year. As much as we were expecting that and can budget for it, it still leaves a hole.”

Despite the difficulties, Williams is working on rebuilding and recovery. “It’s not easy but we’ve got some very clever people working within that realm at the moment … doing everything they can to make sure we have a strong and healthy budget to go racing and compete successfully next year – but it’s not an easy world at Williams at the moment,” Harris said.

Williams competed in its home race at the British Grand Prix last time out and before the event, Harris, who married her partner Marc Harris in January, said: “Coming here and being here has been a really nice boost for everybody and for me in particular. You get to see all our great fans, who do still support us through these difficult times. Hopefully, we will do a better job for our fans.”

It wasn’t to be.

Williams had to address a ‘catastrophic’ design failure that caused aerodynamic stalls. The team attempted to introduce a new rear wing, however, both drivers found themselves to be held back during qualifying.

The mysterious phenomenon was said to be caused by an aerodynamic stall at the diffuser once the DRS was opened and then shut again.

Williams’ Chief technical officer Paddy Lowe touched on the issue, calling it ‘intermittent, but really quite catastrophic’. “In that situation it’s really such an extreme loss of downforce, that it is not really safe,” he said. “Of course we could consider racing without using any DRS, but that is not a way to compete.”

Despite the disappointment of the failed design, Lowe did not rule out a return of the controversial wing in the future for Williams. “I don’t think there is anything sort of fundamentally wrong with this rear wing,” he said. “It is something in the way everything has been put together, it is a combination that is causing some strange phenomenon. We don’t have the answer right now.”

The horrific situation resulted in both Stroll and Sirotkin having to start in the pit lane and Lowe called it an experience he hoped to ‘not ever have to repeat’.

The Williams boss will provide more updates on the situation as the team prepares for the next race in Germany on Sunday but refused to promise ‘any particular outcome’.

“It was very tough weekend,” he admitted “There’s not many people in the team who have had cars starting from the pit lane. It’s not great solution, and they’ve certainly never had two.

“That was a new experience and we hope we don’t have to repeat that. We had to come through Saturday, and delivered ourselves into that state for the start of the race.

“Within the race itself we didn’t show greater pace than anyone else but we got two cars home in good shape. Many teams didn’t manage that. I’m happy with what the team and drivers were able to do. It was a tidy race. We got the best from the car and that’s all we can ask on race day.”

Lance Stroll finished 12th and Sergey Sirotkin 14th … but a return to the points can’t come soon enough.