Williams’ chief technical officer Paddy Lowe has confirmed the design for the 2018 car will contain ‘significant changes’ in order to turn the team’s fortunes around.
After a superb start in the hybrid era with two third place finishes in the constructors’ standings in 2014 & 2015, the Grove-based outfit slipped back to fifth in 2016 and currently lie in the same position with six races to go in the 2017 season.
With a 22-point gap between themselves and Haas in eighth place, there is little certainty of remaining in their current position with the midfield pack extremely close in terms of performance.
Lowe told Sky Sports: “We will be making some quite substantial changes, there are lots of different things that we will be doing and we are well into that at the moment.
“We’ve got some great engineers, some of whom have also come from other teams in recent years, so there are a lot of great ideas there. We have a lot of people who know what it takes to win and we will put the best of that together and make the best car we can.
“There will be quite a few areas where we will be changing philosophy.”
In recent weeks Felipe Massa stated Williams have been ‘moving backwards‘ and must make efforts to improve in the development race in order to improve their current position.
Despite not having the biggest budget on the grid, Lowe believes Williams understand its own shortcomings and must be more efficient with resources to rediscover the speed the team once showed.
“We need to improve in all sorts of areas,” Lowe added. “That’s the nature of the competition. It’s about out-competing the other teams in the most important areas.
“That needs talent, time and money. The problem is no team has enough of those teams, they always want more.
“We have a set of resources and it is our job to do the very best we can with those resources. It’s about efficiency. I think we can be a lot more efficient than we have been at the moment.
“As we build more success, that will attract to us more resources to improve ourselves further. That’s the formula of grand prix development.”
