The Williams BMW team finds itself in a quandary because the recently-unveiled FW25 has not shown substantial aerodynamic improvements over its predecessor, says Frank Williams.
The Williams BMW team finds itself in a quandary because the recently-unveiled FW25 has not shown substantial aerodynamic improvements over its predecessor, says Frank Williams.
Such is the Woking-team’s predicament, that Sir Frank recently told that his team’s 2003-car would struggle to challenge Ferrari for the F1 world championship this season.
“We are not too strong at the moment,” Williams was quoted as saying. “In very simple terms, it is a much better car (than the FW24). It is smaller and lighter and, as the drivers say, it turns in much better, but it is presently behind on aerodynamics.”
With only eight days until the teams take to the Albert Park circuit for the first day of practice and qualifying, Williams BMW technical director Patrick Head said the new car was lacking in speed but could not say how long the problems would take to fix.
“I am of the view that our car isn’t performing well enough,” Head said, echoing Sir Frank’s statement. “It’s not going as well as we want it to and we recognize a few handling problems which we don’t want to be there. We can measure a few aerodynamic characteristics that we think are driving these problems.”
”We are still in the process of understanding the reasons for the problems and it could be as simple as a guide vane deflecting under load, which we might fix overnight. Or it could be much more complex. I don’t think we’re in any sort of trouble like Jaguar at the beginning of last year (the Jaguar R3 chassis was found to be flexing to an alarming degree), but we’re not where we want to be and we’re working hard on it,” Head added.
However, Sir Frank was not as optimistic, saying that Ralf Schumacher’s recent criticism of the car was justified and that the development of the FW25 was indeed behind schedule.
“We started a bit late and we proceeded with one development part which didn’t work, so we went backwards and that was the risk we took,” said Sir Frank. “It was a little bit adventurous for us.”
When asked if he had written off his team’s title chances, Williams replied: “Not yet, absolutely not yet, with the grids being jumbled up anything can happen. I think McLaren and Ferrari will be at the front most of the time, but you never know.”