Williams has put its early-season struggles down to deficiencies with its car and not its driver line-up.
In Sergey Sirotkin and Lance Stroll the British team has the youngest and least experienced line-up on the grid. A disappointing start to the season has seen Williams fail to score a point while all other teams have registered at least one finish in the top ten.
When the driver line-up was announced at the start of the year it received criticism for pairing two inexperienced drivers at a struggling team, but chief technical officer Paddy Lowe insists it is not the reason for the team’s lack of performance at the first three races.
« When you are trying to develop a car, clearly the easiest would be to have a standard test with rather than a human — and you try to do that with experiments in the lab. But in the end everything you do with cars while being driven by real drivers, you have to factor in the quality of the driver, the effect of the driver — that shapes your interpretation of that car. And every driver is different.
« We have two different drivers that are relatively inexperienced, but we are very happy with what they are doing and it is not causing us any issues. We would not allow that to distract from the fact that we have not produced a car that is performing correctly or as we would have intended. »
Lowe said it is now down to the team to develop its way out of its current situation.
« I wouldn’t say that there has been a lot of depression [within the team] because that is not the way to dig yourself out of a situation, » he said. « It is about going away, analysing and understanding where you are. Then understanding what you have to do and focusing the organization around that, which is exactly what we are doing because we are not where we hoped to be and intend to be in terms of competition.
« But it is of our own making. Clearly what we have done has not been good enough. We made some small parts of our [recovery] plan already and deployed them within in China in terms of tests and evaluations. That gave us a lot of information and a lot of data, including some improvements.
« So it may be not all that noticeable, but there is some small progress in the car that we were running in China. There is a sense of optimism already that we can make solid progress and rapid progress. We have already started down that road. »
http://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/23292912/williams-refuses-blame-inexperienced-driver-line-lack-performance
