Williams aims for major step forward at Monaco

Monaco hasn't been a happy hunting ground for the Williams team in recent years, but Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas are determined to turn things around and show their true potential at the historic street circuit this weekend.

"On paper this is still not the best race track for us," admitted Bottas. "For the last few years this has been the weakest weekend for our car, but we're really hoping we can finally move on and start to be better here too.

"I think the approach in terms of the set-up and in terms of the program for the practice is going to be quite different, but it's way too early to say if we've really made the improvements or not.

"The team tried new things during testing in Barcelona, but Barcelona is Barcelona and Monaco is Monaco, so you cannot really simulate this track and these conditions. I'm hoping, but I can't promise anything."

"We were struggling in slow corners in the last years," explained Massa. "We were struggling in sectors like Barcelona’s last sector compared to the other teams, so maybe we are lacking some downforce and mechanical grip and this is something we have been working on in the last two years. It’s also the reason we lost time in the wet.

"We have improved and I hope we still can show a better result this year here in Monaco," he added. "I would say maybe this year in the last sector at Barcelona we were more competitive than in the past. Maybe this is a good point for here, but definitely we need to get on track here before we can be certain about the pace for this weekend."

"I think we have quite a good understanding [of what was wrong in the past]," picked up Bottas. "We've changed mainly on the direction of the set-up of the car mechanically as that wasn't 100 per cent optimised, but we need to prove it here, because, like I said, we cannot test these solutions anywhere else.

"I think it shows it's possible to have a reasonable weekend here as long as we get 100 per cent out of the car. This track requires such a different set-up compared to Barcelona that we'll only find out in practice."

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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.