Williams F1 Staying Positive Amidst Woefully Slow Car

Without a doubt, the Williams F1 team is one of the worst teams on the grid. The Australian GP was certainly proof of it as George Russell and Robert Kubica were miles behind.

Now, the team arrives in Bahrain with a limited number of spare parts. As a result the two drivers are aware of the need to drive the car carefully. They know that they cannot afford to inflict further damage.

However, there is a ray of hope for them, the Williams F1 team believe that they can exploit their current package better. This can be achieved while simultaneously working on the more important issues with the car.

Their troubles began when the production was delayed and Williams F1 missed their shakedown. In addition to that, they missed two days of pre-season testing, potentially missing out on valuable data.

This resulted in parts being rushed through to be put on the car. To make matters worse, there was no time to build up any spares in case of accidents, failures or breakages.

To combat this, Kubica was forced to adapt his driving style accordingly in Australia. The Polish driver admitted that he will have to do so again this weekend in Bahrain. The veteran has said that it will “complicate” things for the team.

“Coming to a new weekend it’s not an easy situation from driver point of view because we will be limited with spare parts,” said Kubica. “Looking at what happened to me in Australia in Friday in FP1, going onto the kerb and damaging floor – we didn’t have bits to replace it and it affected probably all weekend.”

“It’s putting the driver in a difficult position knowing tomorrow the situation is like you cannot go over the kerbs or you can go over the kerbs but the risk is that the car will fall apart and then you have no parts to fit them. It is already difficult that we are lacking performance and we are adding another factor that is complicating our lives. But I know in factory everybody’s working hard so we just need a bit more time to fix.”

Russell concedes that Williams F1 have a lot of work to do to haul themselves back into the midfield, and while the key problem will take time to fix, he believes there are things they can do in the short term to minimise the pain.