A combination of mixed-weather practice at the British Grand Prix, an accident to Alex Albon right off the start and the sprint format in Austria have prevented Williams from carrying out the basic checks for such major changes to the car.
Two race weekends under normal conditions would have given the team six free practice sessions , which they would have used to spend as much time as they wanted reviewing and verifying that the modifications work, but it has not been possible.
For this reason, and finally having enough parts to introduce the latest update to both cars, Williams just wants a dry and smooth free practice session.
Williams’ head of vehicle performance Dave Robson explained why the team needs it: “There’s definitely a little bit of a reset. You have to go through that phase where you have to check that [the car] behaves like the tunnel wind and the simulation say it should, in terms of where you want to angle the ride heights or anything else that affects airflow.”
“Ideally, we would have done it fairly methodically and objectively in the first few free practices at Silverstone, if it hadn’t been in the wet,” he continued.
“It would have been a pretty boring session, but we would have collected the data, compared it to the simulations and then hopefully caught up quickly. We didn’t get a chance to do that,” he lamented.
“At Silverstone we decided not to do it in the second free practice, as we chose to hold and see, and obviously in Austria we didn’t do it in the first free practice because we had to do all the preparation work for the race,” explained one of the visible heads. of the British team.
“We will probably have to do some of that in France, and then hopefully we can progress more quickly.”
Although the updated Williams has shown some flashes of speed when it has been able to run unrestricted, and Albon almost crashed in Q3 in Austria, the team is unsure how much it has improved with the new package.
“It’s still hard to quantify,” Robson added. “Silverstone was difficult. In Austria, with only one practice session and a lot of homework in preparation for the race, we didn’t do as much measuring work as we would have liked.”
“There are signs that [the update] is promising and some positive feedback from Alex [Albon]. But I think we still haven’t figured out how to make the most of it.”
Albon said in Austria that he found the new Williams to be more ‘spiky’, meaning it produces its best performance in a fairly narrow configuration window.
While this doesn’t seem like an ideal feature, Robson isn’t alarmed, saying it’s simply a consequence of the car’s settings not being fully fine-tuned.
“I think with aerodynamics, the more you push, that happens naturally. I’m hopeful that with a bit more work on the mechanical side to complement the aerodynamics, we can fine-tune it.” “But I think some of that is going to be unavoidable, and it’s going to have to be absorbed by his driving style.”
Ultimately, what Williams is looking for with the new car is both a step up in pace in the current season, and a better platform for its long-term ambitions in 2023. Robson says there are three different areas of improvement that the team is exploring.
“It’s designed to be more balanced. And I think it’s showing signs of that, but we probably still need to work a bit more mechanically to optimize what we have now in terms of aerodynamics,” he explained.
“I think it’s a better aerodynamic package in terms of load and strength. And then the third thing is something we still have to test, but it’s where the tunnel is being worked on, we think it’s a much better platform for development in the future”.
“So those are the kind of things that we’re aiming for. I think there are indications of all three, but we haven’t been able to quantify them yet.”
And that’s why a boring Friday at Paul Ricard , to get that proper grounding to understand if the upgrades are working, is so important to Williams at the moment.
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