Williams chief test and support engineer Rod Nelson says the team will be willing to take more risks this season.
Having endured a poor 2013, Williams had a very competitive car last season and was often the closest challenger to Mercedes. However, it took until the Austrian Grand Prix for the team to score its first podium and Nelson admits it took a conservative approach to chasing results last year, something he believes will change in 2015.
“I hope we’re a little bit more consistent,” Nelson said. “We could have had a pretty good result in Australia but one of the drivers was taken out on the line and the other one had a bit of a scuff on the wall. So that would have coloured the first few races a little differently.
“After the 2013 season we were obviously focusing on regular points, so we were probably relatively risk-averse. We had to get a good stash of points before we moved forward from that, and then we were targeting podiums and then if things had gone our way maybe we could have got a win or two.
“This season I think we will perhaps be less risk-averse. We have a level of performance which remains to be seen what it is, but we’ve got a reasonable idea and we can reasonably confident that we should be challenging for good points at most races.”
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