Williams head of car performance Rob Smedley admits a weakness of the FW37 is its ability to use the soft tyres.
Both Williams drivers Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas qualified fourth and fifth respectively in China last weekend and both finished a position lower on race day.
Although the team opted to put the drivers on the slower white-marked medium tyres for the second as opposed to the faster soft tyres Mercedes and Ferrari ran during that particular stint. prompting Massa and Bottas to fall back further behind their rivals.
The reason behind it was revealed by Smedley to be due to Williams struggling to stretch the life in the soft tyres to last a full race stint.
“The standout point was that the two teams in front of us in the championship were able to run the option in the second stint,” Smedley pointed out.
“If you look at our degradation towards the end of the first stint, it was high enough to ward us off that tyre. We have to go away and look at the philosophy of our weekend and understand why we couldn’t run the option.”
Smedley also added that excessive heat in the new mediums constructed by Pirelli this season is a fundamental characteristic of the tyre all teams are trying to get to grips with.
“I think overheating the medium is a bit of a feature of that tyre,” he said.
“If you look at our pace towards the end of the race with Ferrari when we were both on primes, it was actually more similar. So I don’t think we are overheating that medium any worse than anybody else.”
