Deputy team principal Claire Williams says Williams are still evaluating options for their 2017 line-up and are in no rush to make a decision over the future of Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa.
The Grove-based team have yet to make a decision over their line-up for next season with McLaren’s Jenson Button the leading candidate to join Williams next season.
“We are evaluating our options. We still feel it’s quite early in the year to be making our decision.
“We have some performance issues at the moment so we really need Valtteri and Felipe to be concentrating on their track performance rather than worrying about what’s happening in 2017.
“As you’d expect those conversations are going on behind closed doors and when we’re ready to make an announcement we will, but I don’t foresee that being the next few races.”
Williams have dropped to fourth in the Constructors’ Championship after comfortably finishing third in the previous two seasons. In recent races, Force India, Haas and McLaren have shown better performance than Williams.
Williams has expressed her concerns about their recent form and believes the team are working very hard to move forward.
“We don’t want to be going backwards,” she said. “At the moment we seem to be having to look over our shoulders more than looking ahead to Red Bull and worrying about the Force Indias.
“That’s a problem and that’s a real concern for us and we need to address it. Fortunately, we’ve done quite a lot of analysis over the past few races to identify those areas of weakness and put them right.
“For us that work is going on behind closed doors. We have some upgrades coming to the next few races, we have a new front wing here, which we hope is going to deliver a bit more performance to us, but there are other areas, structural areas of weakness in the business that we’re addressing at the moment.”
