Williams suffered a bruising time on Sunday in Sao Paulo, with Alex Albon unable to start after crashing in qualifying and Franco Colapinto also ending up on the wall in Q1 before subsequently crashing out of the race.
Albon's qualifying crash resulted in too much damage for him to start the Grand Prix later in the day, but Colapinto was more fortunate and the team put his FW46 back together in time for him to make the grid for lights out.
Colapinto enjoyed a good start with a four place jump from 16th to 12th on the first lap. However by lap 22 he was struggling and he subsequently lost control of the car behind the safety car on lap 31.
“The team did an amazing job to put the car back on track for the race, and I destroyed it again,” Colapinto told the official Formula 1 website after the race. “So I'm very sad for the team."
"We had boxed for intermediates," he explained. "I was pushing to get the tyre temps up, and I just lost the car on one of the big rivers of water on the track.
“It was a very tough day for us. Honestly, things didn't go our way today," lamented the Argentine. "I think we had a quick car."
"It's obviously a really frustrating day," said Albon. "I can only feel sorry for the team, as I know the damage over the last few weeks has been tremendous and it's putting us in a challenging position for the next three races.
"I really didn't expect the incident in turn 1 to happen, so we need to take a proper look to figure out what happened. It's disappointing as it would've been a great opportunity to score points."
With so much damage to both cars this weekend, team boss James Voiwles admitted that there was now a concern about spare points and the amount of money left to cover the remaining three races of the season.
“We had three incredibly large crashes in just a few hours from one another," he told the media. "[We have] a tremendous amount of work to get ourselves back on top of our spares situation before we go to Las Vegas in just a few weeks."
“The nature of F1 is that you can have some of the most incredible feelings and results, as well as some of the lowest moments that you can feel within a sport," he added. "I think it's fair to say this weekend is the second of those two.”
The fallout from the weekend was not limited to the physical and financial damage. Williams were also leap-frogged in the points by Alpine and are now in ninth place in the constructors championship.
“Our rivals Alpine were quick in the race, no doubt about it,” Vowles acknowledged. “They deserved those positions.
"They scored a huge bag of points putting them back up into a very high championship position and demoting us back down to ninth.," he said. [But] I never give up until it's time to give up, and that won't be until we're in Abu Dhabi and the checked flag has dropped.
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