Williams: We have undergone a huge transformation

Williams

Williams: We have undergone a huge transformation

Claire Williams says the team, as a business, is unrecognisable from 12 months ago

Martin Macdonald

Saturday 7 March 2020 09:49

Claire Williams has praised the “huge” transformation which the team has undergone over the past 12 months, as they look to put the worst F1 season in their history behind them from 2019.

Last season, with Robert Kubica and George Russell behind the wheel, they managed to accumulate just one point over the course of the campaign, finishing dead last in the constructors’ championship and generally just being completely uncompetitive.

However, Williams insists the team are in a much better position now than they were at this point last year when their car actually failed to turn up for the first two days of testing.

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“We are still on our journey to recovery, and we’re still putting bricks in the wall in order to achieve that,” Williams said.

“I think for everybody that’s been working behind the scenes at Grove over the last 12 months, we’ve all undergone a huge transformation and change, and what we would like to see now is the rewards of that change.

“The business is really unrecognisable from where we were with everything, whether that be structures or processes, policies etc, how we go about designing and building a race car is very different to what it was from 2018 and prior to that.

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“I’m so pleased to see that changes that we have made have been embraced by everybody within the team, and I think we are starting to see some rewards from those changes that we’ve put in place.

“We’ve still got a long way to go to get Williams back to where we want to see it.”

Things appear to be altogether more organised within the team and in the background in 2020, and Williams says this comes from a careful planning infrastructure which they didn’t have previously.

“We’ve left no stone unturned to investigate how every step of that process works, and made necessary changes where we needed to,” the deputy team principal continued.

“There are some headline areas that we focused on, so putting a very comprehensive planning function in place is something that we’ve done.

“We now have a planning team, eight-strong, with certain areas of the business that each individual is focused on to make sure we see a design through and aero right through to the end of the process.

“The planning function is not something that we’ve had, certainly in that regard, for a number of years at Williams. That was one of the major reasons we fell down last year, not getting our car to testing.

“You can sense the difference in the team, the greater level of communication in all the areas across the department.

“The spirit has always been there, but it’s there more than I’ve ever seen it before.”

Williams have a new partnership this season, with Nicholas Latifi coming in to replace the departing Robert Kubica.