Even WilliamsF1 Technical Director Patrick Head would acknowledge the shortcomings of the new car. In a recent interview Head responded to the issue of the FW25 by saying: " ... we had a bit of a difficult introduction with the car and certainly various actions that we’d taken over the winter and different decisions meant that, in the form that we produced the car first, its aerodynamic performance wasn’t that strong. But that’s been improved quite a lot and is the subject, as with all teams, of continuous development but we’re now on a much stronger development path."

Head responded to the teams poor performance at the San Marino Grand Prix, a race where it was expected that the FW25 would perform strongly.

Head added: "We certainly didn’t get a particularly strong result at Imola, more because of some errors around pit stops and some inconsistency between sets of tyres in the way they had been prepared. That meant that some behaved quite well on the track and some didn’t behave quite well and that didn’t necessarily fit in with predictions.

.... it’s part of understanding exactly the beast you have and the way it uses its tyres on the different circuits and being able to predict that. I think our performance is certainly stronger than was shown by the finishing result at Imola, but still, I’m sure it isn’t going to be good enough to deal with Ross’s new car. So, as with all teams, were developing hard and bringing improvement to the car. The basic car I’m quite happy with which was not the case last year. I think we concluded pretty early on that the basis of the car was not a sound platform that we could develop through the season. Ferrari had come out with a step that was just too far ahead for us to compete with. You never give up, you’re always pushing as hard as you can, but when you’re making realistic judgments, that was the judgment made at Williams. But this car, I think the basis of it is a lot better and it’s a good platform to develop through the season.


Moving on to the subject of pit stops Head was questioned as to the teams continued troubles with their pit stops including the refuelling rigs. It has been the case that the team always has problems with these rigs, with Montoya suffering from a failure of the unit during the San Marino Grand Prix. Is this something that the team can fix.

Head responded by saying that he did not feel that there was an issue with the teams pit stops.

Head went on to explain by saying: "I don’t think that’s really the case. Obviously there’s been a few pointed fingers going around but there were also some summaries and I think in the last races of last year and the races so far this year, in more than half of the races, the Williams pit stop, taking out the amount of fuel added, which is calculated from the distance run by the car afterwards, has been the fastest single pit stop. But the difficulty comes when you look at both. We often have one car that gave a problem. We had a number of different problems at Imola.

One was Ralf doing the right things going out of the pit stop, Juan came into a pit stop and slid about a meter and a half too far on and obviously that tends to suddenly mean you’ve guys waiting with the wheel gun and the car’s there (indicates) and the refuelling guy’s here (indicates) and the socket’s there and that causes a major upset to begin with. Obviously they do practise with moving along but if you want a quick pit stop that’s the finest way not to start it off.

Then we had a misunderstanding amongst our crew which, I certainly won’t go into, because when one explains it, it is almost unbelievable to understand it can happen and it’s embarrassing to all of us and it was embarrassing to them but quite clearly we’ve made some changes and the same problem won’t occur again.

As for the teams overall performance, including pit stops, Head was questioned as to why the WilliamsF1team, which has been in the business for many years, simply does not get their act together.

Head responded with: "You’re absolutely right .... This business is quite a demanding business if you’re in it and the only thing that makes it satisfying is to be successful at it. If you’re not successful at it, it is frustrating but there is no point throwing the toys out of the pram, you have to sit down and work out what the problem is. If changes have to be made you have to sit down and make those changes, different mechanisms and structures have to be set in order to overcome the problem and it is an activity that requires understanding and action.

As I said we used to have problems with pit-stops and recently our pit-stops have been a lot better and a lot more competitive and reliable. The wonderful thing about Grand Prix racing is that one minute you make a mess of something and two weeks later you’ve got another opportunity. But I mean okay McLaren are a fantastic team and they are the team at the moment, but you look at the mess they were in at Silverstone last year making the most extraordinary mistakes with the tyres going in all the wrong directions and drivers screaming and shouting and one wonders whether McLaren made the right decision about which tyres to put there cars on in Melbourne. They were saved by a number of safety cars although Ron Dennis said to me ‘we knew the safety cars were going to come out on them laps so we planned that in advance’ and I thought ‘oh well I’m not going to have that discussion’.

But you know the team that looks the heroes one time can look…I mean Ross has seen it. Most of the time it comes from good decision, good technical, good driver, good car – most of the time they look fantastic. But even in the last two years there is a couple of times where they have had major problems in pit-stops, but could be picked up and made them to look stupid. But they are not stupid. They sort it out and it doesn’t happen again."

From the comments Patrick head has made it definitely looks like there is room for improvement, but this the team recognises and is working on.