Williams confident key issues being resolved

Off the back of a disappointing 2018 season, Claire Williams is confident her team is successfully tackling the areas that resulted in it finishing bottom of the constructors’ championship.

Williams slipped from fifth place in 2017 to finish 10th last season, picking up a total of just seven points to finish 26 adrift of ninth-placed Toro Rosso. While the deputy team principal is wary of not being able to judge any progress over the winter against its rivals at this stage, Williams says internal targets to improve specific aspects within the team have so far been met.

“The atmosphere is good actually, I have to say,” Williams told RACER. “Everyone’s working really hard. We’ve obviously had the plan that we’ve put in place around car development that’s been ongoing for a while now and that’s been going I think probably as we would expect.

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Claire Williams

“I think it’s a case of we clearly have got to wait and see until we get to testing to see what everyone else is doing so it’s quite difficult to judge the progress we’re making at this point. We’re pretty happy that we have resolved some of the key issues that we had last year but our recovery is still very much a work in progress.”

While car performance is a key area being addressed over the winter, Williams says there are other aspects to the company that have received serious focus in order to strengthen for the future.

“There’s lots of other work that has been going on around the business as a whole that we’ve undertaken that we talked about last year -- making sure that the business and its structure, processes and resources are all fit for purpose.

“So we’re doing a huge amount of work making sure that everything is set up in the right way for us to do the job that we need to in order to ensure that our recovery plan goes according to plan, if that makes sense.”