Williams tight-lipped on Lowe exit after FW42 delay

Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams refused to blame technical director Paddy Lowe for the "embarrassing" delay in getting the team's 2019 car on-track in time for the start of pre-season testing. Williams sat out two and a half days of action in Barcelona due to a failure to get the FW42 built in time.

George Russell finally took the car to the track on Wednesday afternoon, after it had only arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya earlier that morning.

According to reports, a fundamental design flaw was to blame for the delay, piling pressure on Williams and Lowe, who has failed to make a positive impact on the team's fortunes since joining from champions Mercedes in 2017.

Lowe cancelled media commitments on Wednesday, doing little to quell speculation that his job may be on the line, but Williams said the engineer is not solely to blame.

"I haven't paid too much attention to it [speculation surrounding Lowe], to be honest with you," Williams told Sky Sports.

Up and running in Barcelona! #F1Testing pic.twitter.com/EXKZynxT23 — ROKiT WILLIAMS RACING (@WilliamsRacing) February 20, 2019

"There is always a lot of speculation in these circumstances.

"But we don't apportion any blame at Williams, that's the not the name of the game and not what you need to be focusing your energy on.

"It's about us all clubbing together and making sure we understand why we were unable to deliver the car and do that after-action review and learn from the mistakes."

Pressed further on Lowe's reportedly precarious prospects in a subsequent media session, Williams was unmoved.

"I've been reading a lot of speculation in the media recently about Paddy's position," she said.

"Right now all I'm focused on, and all the team should be focused on is the car, and making sure the car is in the right place."

Williams said an "inquest" into the delayed start would soon begin at the team's base in Grove.

"We're clearly aware of some of the issues," she added. "But it's too early in the day to start discussing them in any detail and probably something that we wouldn’t do anyway.

"We need to resolve what went wrong or to analyse what went wrong and then to resolve it so that this doesn't happen again at Williams."

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