Williams’ chief engineer Dave Robson says the team’s overweight car this year has led to frustration regarding missed results, but is not being allowed to overshadow long-term goals.
Under James Vowles’ leadership, Williams made significant changes to the way it manufactures its chassis over the winter but nearly didn’t have two cars ready for the start of the season, and the lack of a spare caught it out in Australia. Overall performance has also been impacted by the car being significantly above the weight limit, and ahead of a planned major upgrade after the summer break, Robson admits the overall progress being made as a team has still been paired with annoyance at what could have been this year.
“I think there’s both,” Robson said. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that we did take a step backwards in order to ultimately take some global steps forward, and we will see that play out. But equally, when you’re on the pit wall watching qualifying, particularly at the beginning of the year, every time our qualifying was over, we looked at each other and we said, ‘If only this had been at the weight limit.’ Then you start looking and we would have been so much further up.
“James was very good in saying you can’t think like that, but in the moment it obviously is frustrating. And maybe with perfect hindsight we wouldn’t have changed what we did or what we set out to do — maybe we would have changed a little bit about how we did it and maybe we would have started the whole process earlier.
“So there’s definitely some frustration and some regret in the moment, but I think we can all see the bigger picture and what James is trying to lead us towards. So it is a little bit of short-term pain but I think we can all see where this will play out.”
Robson says it’s not actually the chassis itself that has been an issue when it comes to the car’s weight, but the impact the new approach to manufacturing it had on other aspects of the car.
“I think we can look back now and say we were quite ambitious with what we took on over the winter,” he reflected. “We completely changed the way we manufactured the chassis, and that brought about some weight-saving from the chassis as well as allowing us to do some very useful R&D type work that will play out over the coming years.
“So it’s one of those big cases where we took on quite a lot, quite a big challenge technically, and although it wasn’t exactly intended when we embarked on that route — obviously that decision was taken pretty early — the knock-on of that was it was a bit more complicated than we expected. That had ramifications for some other parts that we kind of had to rush the design through.
“So the net result was that although the chassis was quite a good step forward, the overall car finished up heavier than it was intended to.”