Claire Williams insists team is 'not in crisis'

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Williams Racing deputy team principal Claire Williams has insisted that the squad is not in crisis, despite its embarrassing late start to pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Williams missed the first two and a half days of the test in Spain when delays hit production of the new FW42.

The car only arrived in the early hours of Wednesday morning and finally hit the track after lunch, although it's still lacking several key 2019-specification components.

But Williams was playing down the situation and said that while the delay had been an "embarrassment", it was not a body blow to their hopes for the forthcoming season.

Lowe feeling the load after Williams testing no-show

"Now we have the car on track, we’re back on track,” she told reporters in Spain on Thursday. “It’s not crisis mode.

“We’ve still got work to do, but we always said this was going to be a long road," she added.

Williams still didn't want to go into specifics of what went wrong to force the team to delay its arrival at this week's test, and resisted naming names - especially that of under-fire technical director Paddy Lowe.

“There are a lot of elements to [the delay], but I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to air our dirty laundry in public," she said. "It’s not right to do that for the people who are working so hard at Grove.

"We’ve just got it wrong, and we’ve got to fix that," Williams continued, adding that it was part of the process of rebuilding the team after its recent on- and off-track struggles.

“We said putting this team back together was going to take time and take work," she explained.

"I think probably we got to car build and we had to go through that process as much as we went through last season, and that process clearly isn’t right at Williams either.

"We’ve got a journey we’re on and we’ve got to make sure everything is fit for purpose, so that we don’t make these mistakes in the future [and that] we produce a better race car and have more success on the race track.

“We haven’t nailed that yet and we need to do some work to make sure it is fit for purpose going into 2020, but it takes time.

"Hopefully you’ll see a much more successful Williams in the coming years," she concluded.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.