Williams' design efforts for 2018 will follow a whole new approach under the guidance of technical director Paddy Lowe.
The Grove-based outfit, which hoped to lead the mid-field battle this year, has clearly under-performed so far according to its own expectations.
Williams' FW40 has proved inconsistent this season in terms of pace and balance, leaving the team currently fifth in the Constructors' standings but with a big points deficit to fourth-placed Force India.
"We will be making some quite substantial changes," said tech boss Paddy Lowe.
"There are lots of different things that we’ll be doing and we’re well into that at the moment. There will be quite a few areas where we will be changing philosophy."
"We have to look at the trends. We are fighting hard in that midfield group. We haven’t created any distance ahead of it but if anything we’ve slipped well into it in the last couple of months.
"We need to understand if that's something where we’re going wrong or if we have been out-developed."
Williams, which does not enjoy a top tier budget, has always strived to be as cost-effective as possible. But Lowe also believes that the team has perhaps not extracted the most from its resources.
"We need to improve in all sorts of areas, that’s the nature of the competition," said the 55-year-old engineer.
"It’s about out-competing with the other teams in all the important areas.
"We have a set of resources and it's our job to do the best we can with those resources. It’s about efficiency. We can be a lot more efficient than we are being at the moment.
"As we achieve more success, that will attract more resources to improve ourselves still further. That’s the formula of Grand Prix development."
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