Williams' chief technical officer Pat Symonds has pretty much ruled out the Grove outfit's chances of securing a win during the remainder of the season.
Williams kicked off its 2015 campaign on a level par with Ferrari, as the dominant Mercedes squad remained out of reach, but the performance gap between the Scuderia and Willams has now stretched in favour of the Italian team.
In the wake of a dismal and unusually uncompetitive Monaco Grand Prix weekend, Symonds is confident the lapse of performance of both Massa and Bottas around the twisty Principality streets was transitory, but insists an outright victory remains a distant prospect for now.
" In 2015 we have a couple of teams, one of which is significantly in front of us and the other is the one which has put itself in the position of picking up the pieces when things go wrong," Symonds told Sky Sports F1. "Interestingly, last year we probably were in the right position. But on the three occasions when Mercedes did fail it happened to be Red Bull that picked up the pieces. It could just as easily have been Williams."
While Head of Vehicule Performance Rob Smedley also viewed the team's fruitless Monaco showing as a momentary mishap, it did not bar the team from investigating the roots of the specific underperformance.
“I have said it before now and I will say it again now and I will keep repeating it, if you want to be a top team, you can't fear anywhere," Smedley said. "We now just have to go away and look at all aspects of the performance."
Both Smedley and Symonds consider Williams' aspirations of once again becoming a top team intact and believe the outfit is heading in the right direction, but the process is all part of a longer term game plan.
"We want to be racing at the front and we want to be racing for wins so that is what our long term strategy is based around," Symonds concluded. " I think we can be quite successful at it because we have thought it through quite carefully. It is not a sort of random thing of let’s go racing and see what happens. We have plans in place which I believe will improve our competitiveness and will give us the wins."
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