Bottom of the grid spot 'an enormous shock' to Claire Williams

Williams' relentless slump this season to the bottom of Formula 1's grid has been a predictably painful and shocking experience for deputy team principal Claire Williams.

Up until this year, the Grove-based outfit's position in F1's pecking order since the advent of the hybrid era in F1 in 2014 varied from third to fifth.

However, with just two races remaining on docket, Williams is bringing up the rear with little hope of relinquishing its final tenth-place spot in the Constructors' standings.

"It's been an enormous shock actually," Claire Williams told F1's official website.

"I fully expected to come into this year in a much better place. I think we all did, and probably a lot of fans of ours around the world thought that we were going to be coming out with a much quicker race car.

"That was the expectation, so when we got to testing, we didn't even have to wait till Australia to really realise that that wasn't the case."

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Unfortunately, the issues that impacted the performance of the team's FW41 at the outset - mainly linked to the car's aerodynamics - were of a chronic nature, and have kept Williams pinned down.

"I couldn't quite believe that Williams was repeatedly finding itself down at the bottom of the grid, either in qualifying or the race. And I don't think I've quite gotten over that shock yet," she added.

"All I know is that there are two races to go and I can't wait until the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi, if I'm allowed to say that."

Remaining bold in the face of adversity is genetically coded into the Williams family's genes, and Claire Williams underlines how the team has endured its quandary this season through thick and thin.

"Clearly there are a number of issues at play but I'm not one to air dirty laundry," she said.

"One of the things that I'm proudest of this year is that the team has really stuck together.

"We could have imploded, we could have all started a load of in-fighting, we could have sacked half the people, but that's not the way that I wanted this to play out.

"Of course we've had conversations, and we know the clear areas of weakness.

"I think probably the world can see the biggest areas of weakness for us, and of course there has to be accountability. We have to look at where we've gone wrong."

The aero and cooling flaws inadvertently designed into the FW41 appear as the main culprits of the car's under-performance, but Williams insists that other areas have drawn scrutiny.

"Probably aero we went wrong with, cooling we went wrong with, but there are many other factors at play," she explains.

"You don't find yourself sliding back from P5 to P10 in the championship without a lot of other things at play as well. It's not just about how we went about designing our race car over the winter."

With the introduction of several rule changes for 2019, centered around aerodynamics, it's hard to project Williams' immediate future.

But there's no lack of determination on the part of the Grove troops to extricate F1's third most successful team from the doldrums.

"All I can say is we're doing every single thing possible to make sure that we address every single problem that we have in this team in order to make sure 2019 is better for us," she says.

"But if it’s not, at least I know that we're setting ourselves up for certainly a better future beyond that."

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