In an interview session at the
Barcelona Test Deputy team principal Claire Williams spoke of the delays
with the arrival of the FW42 seeing the team loses two days of testing
Claire would put the delays down to design process for the FW42 and that
nothing had to do with either financial issues or delays with suppliers.
Claire Williams attempted to dampen the speculation over the Williams’ teams
absence from the first two days of testing last week. Some of this
speculation pointed to financial issues delaying payment to their suppliers.
Claire said: "I think there were many stories around about what potentially
could have been the cause of it. A couple that I read were that there were
issues with external suppliers. That wasn't the case. Or that financially we
were in a difficult position and that had an impact on car build. It
didn't."
Claire added: "I think we take for granted sometimes that we're going to get
one car to the test track and two cars to the race track. But Williams still
builds, or designs and builds its race cars in-house, in their entirety.
"There are 22-odd-thousand parts to a car, which we have to design, which we
have to manufacture, which we have to assemble, which we have to put through
crash testing etc, and that's an enormous job. And we just didn't make it
for a number of reasons."
Claire tried to point out that delays on the arrival of new cars are not
unknown having occurred in the past. Claire said: "I think it can
happen. I think we've seen historically that it can happen, and we need to
just make absolutely sure that the situation doesn't happen again."
"There has been some work started, but it will probably take a few weeks to
fully compile that, and we have to get it right because if we don't get the
review right, then we're not going to get next year's programme right.
"So we've got to take our time and make sure we cover every base off, and
make sure we get it right for next year."
Despite the delay the Williams team has had a productive test so far with no
unforeseen issues been experienced so far. But there are still questions to
the cars performance but Claire was adamant that the Williams teams is yet
to show their true performance.
"I think we still have to wait
and see exactly where we are," she said.
"Clearly we don't want to be at the back again, but I have always said, and
I said last week, this is journey, it is a pathway and other teams have done
an exceptional job to maybe make better inroads than we have”.
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