Williams: 'We can't have another year like this'

In a season in which it has not lived up to its own expectations, Williams is looking for a fresh start next year and undertaking fundamental changes to achieve it.

Deputy team principal Claire Williams acknowledged her team's lackluster campaign which has fallen short of its initial ambition to race as the third or fourth best team in the field.

Tech boss Paddy Lowe, who left Mercedes at the beginning of the year to move to Williams, has undertaken a thorough analysis of the outfit's state of affairs, and promised a fundamental change in philosophy in the future in a bid the extract the most from its resources and improve its relative performance.

"As you would expect, someone of Paddy’s calibre has a plan," said Williams in Friday’s FIA press conference.

• Williams embarks on 'substantial changes' for 2018

"Ever since he joined us back in March this year he’s been undertaking a full analysis of the team back at the factory but also the race team operations on the ground track-side in order to understand where the weaknesses lie.

"We’ve gone through that as a board. And now we’re looking at how we allocate resources forward into 2018 so that we can address those weaknesses.

"A lot of our weaknesses appeared at the mid-point of last season and we can’t go into another season having the same issues we’ve had.

"So we have full trust in Paddy but also we brought in a number of other senior personnel to work alongside him.

"Dirk de Beer heads out aerodynamic department as well, comes from Ferrari this year to us. And some other senior engineers that are hopefully going to turn things around for us.

"But as I said we can’t have another year like this."

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