How can Lowe make Williams great again?

How to go about transforming Williams into a force that can one day topple Mercedes and Ferrari - the biggest and mightiest teams in Formula 1?

That is the monumental task facing Paddy Lowe at Williams, the faded star he rejoined this season after a 25-year hiatus.

He is not alone in this mission, but he is uniquely placed. Lowe, of course, was a senior technical cog in the relentlessly grinding wheel of fortune that bestowed a dominant run of three consecutive F1 world championship doubles on Mercedes. Lowe knows what it takes to win in V6 hybrid Formula 1 - because he is one of the few technical leaders who has.

But now he is one of the unprivileged many on the outside looking in.

Ferrari and Mercedes are scrapping epically at the front this season; everyone else is merely part of the sideshow.

Those with genuine ambition to join the party, among which Williams will count itself, must work out how to break down the barriers to opportunity.

Renault has taken the 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' approach, building up a works team in the Ferrari/Mercedes mould from the ashes of its last successful effort. This is headed in the right direction, but currently sits near the lower end of the midfield. There is a very long way to go.

Red Bull is the last world championship-winning customer team (2010-13), but has slipped back into its own no-man's land thanks in large part to the inadequacy of the Renault engine supply under the V6 formula.

The team benefits from the backing of an engaged billionaire businessman, support from the pre-eminent F1 aerodynamicist of the past 30 years, and arguably the best driver line-up on the grid, but now finds itself forever on the cusp - able to just about compete on street tracks, but no more.

McLaren has rejected the Red Bull model, wholeheartedly believing it's impossible to beat factory teams while being among their customers.

It used to be the works Mercedes team, but now Mercedes has its own squad McLaren feels it cannot compete without doing something different - hence its so far disastrous dalliance with Honda. Two steps back and still waiting for the giant leap forward, wondering if it ever will.

There are other teams in F1 that simply know their limits and work within them. Force India is the lean, mean, overachieving midfielder, capable of impressive giantkilling acts on occasion, but not really built to win.

Haas is the newfangled customer car guinea pig - buy as much as you can from the best, then hope for the best. It's a great way to begin, but offers limited ultimate potential.

Toro Rosso is a nifty little team - much more consistently competitive than when it was Minardi - but ultimately it is little more than Red Bull's driver training school.

Sauber is F1's plucky backmarker. Now financially viable again and able to score points on occasion, but a long way from doing more - and in the immediate future now utterly dependent on the same Honda miracles McLaren prays for every night.

In the middle of this disparate group sits Williams, a team of great heritage and repute, but of limited means. A team that refuses to sell its soul for success, but firmly believes it can be world champion again.

Williams maintains this belief despite not having won a world championship in the two decades since its halcyon days as the works Renault outfit, and despite not having regularly won races since it last had a works engine supply of any description - courtesy of BMW from 2000 until the end of '04.

Williams lacks the budget and manpower of F1's modern powerhouse teams, relies on regulatory equality regarding engine supply as a customer team, and employs inferior drivers to most midfield outfits, let alone the top ones.

So, simply put, how can it ever hope to compete with the best? This is the question Lowe must answer.

Having rejoined the team with which he began his career in the 1980s, Lowe is tasked with - and literally invested in, now he is a part team owner and shareholder - ensuring the glory days return to this success-starved outfit.

"The main point is it's got to be done one step at a time," Lowe tells Autosport.

"There is no route to instant glory in this sport, as in any other business. You see people talk about some idea that everybody has a right to success, or rapid success, or even instant success, and there's no such thing.

"You have to work away at it one step at a time across the whole range of ingredients that it takes to make a championship-winning campaign. I take your point that there are a lot of areas in which the team is behind optimum, let's say. There's work to do in all sectors."

For Lowe, Williams's biggest problem is (surprise, surprise) funding. The team takes pride from the fact that it used to win in F1 in the 1990s while spending less than its rivals, but times have changed.

Although there is help available, in the form of regulations that ensure equality of engine supply between customers and works teams, plus rules that limit windtunnel and CFD use, beating F1's big teams looks impossible on a midfield budget.

"I'm not trying to make excuses, but we're all well aware there's a historically disproportionate skew in the central funding of the teams at the moment, which has never existed before, which makes it difficult to compete on level terms with the top three teams," argues Lowe, who says he simultaneously believes in the "meritocracy in Formula 1 - you earn the right to earn more money than the next guy by having done a better job".

"But again that's just a project for me - how do we work with the other teams, work with the sport as a whole and the new owners, to achieve a scenario in which there isn't such a steep gradient between success and making up the numbers?"

This magnanimous, pragmatic attitude is all well and good, but it sounds defeatist - that the best Williams can hope to achieve is finishing fourth every year (sixth once better-funded outfits McLaren and Renault get their respective acts together) until F1's new owners revamp its financial arrangements. Not so, says Lowe.

"I don't see it that way," he counters. "You've got to keep working and improving every way you can with what you've got - and that's exactly what we're doing.

"The really fantastic thing about Williams is the strength of the brand, and the sense you feel that Williams is the type of team that is wanted in the sport.

"You saw the overwhelming popularity of the Williams 40th event with 50,000 fans. I know the tickets were free, but you've still got to take a day out of work, travel there [to Silverstone] - that requires a certain amount of dedication.

"To me that's a great illustration of the fact that Formula 1 has a fanbase, much like other sports - football, for instance - where people are looking to a particular team through good and bad times and they want to see it through. They'll support that team maybe for their entire lives.

"That support gives Williams a great basis from which to work. We're not in bad shape at the moment. We're distinctly a middle-field team, but we want to be winners again, and that's a fantastic platform from which to do so."

But overwhelming support from fans who remember the glory days of Williams and dearly wish for them to return is not going to be enough - unless those 50,000 supporters are all wealthy enough to donate £3000 per year each to the Williams cause, or one of them happens to be an aerodynamicist of Adrian Newey's quality and is willing to start work immediately.

In the short term, Lowe must identify the areas of structural weakness within the current Williams operation and work out cost-effective ways to make it perform better. That way the team should perform better on track, achieve better results, and thus earn more prize money and attract greater levels of sponsorship.

But he will also have to work on modernising a team that, while possessing great heritage and tradition, has been guilty of failing to move with the times.

Cultural change takes a long time to take effect, but Lowe can take heart from the way Williams revamped its pitstop procedures to become F1's fastest team in the pits consistently last season. Williams has shown a willingness to adapt if given the right direction.

"There are certainly some areas that need modernising, that's true," Lowe admits.

"But the pitstops example is a nice one, as it just shows that if you pick on an area and you're determined to be the best at that, then you can go and do it. And Williams did exactly that.

"The tricky bit is you can't do that with everything - there are not enough people or hours in the day, or money. How do you pick the 10 or 20 projects that are worth tackling in the way that we've tackled pitstops?

"There are a lot of things we can do better. That would be true in any team, even teams that are winning are constantly trying to understand how they can be better than they are today, and if you stop doing that you're going to start losing.

"Despite what I said about funding, we have to be better with what we've got. That means doing a better job - a more efficient job - in engineering, in racing. That's a virtuous process that attracts more sponsors, attracts better drivers, attracts better engineers. You have to build that momentum; it's not something you can deliver overnight.

"It's something where you have to keep chipping away year in, year out, and if you make the right decisions, you generate the right processes, the right culture, you can move yourselves forward. We've got some great people and we're working together to do exactly that."

Lowe says Williams has "great confidence" in its new head of aerodynamics, Dirk de Beer, who started work at Grove in March after leaving Ferrari in the middle of last year. Although de Beer's arrival is not something Lowe can claim credit for, it is a sign Williams is working to address its failings.

Williams has not found downforce easy to come by in recent campaigns, and development has consistently gone awry since an encouraging performance in the first season of the V6 hybrid formula in 2014.

But this year's FW40 is better - considered by most to be the out-and-out fastest car in the midfield - and Lowe says de Beer's influence is already starting to be felt within the team.

"You can see today that Ferrari has a great car out there, so we're very fortunate to have Dirk on the team, who's doing a fantastic job," Lowe adds. "I think we're already starting to see the benefits of what he's bringing us as a new leader in that area."

Lowe naturally plays down his own impact on Williams since returning to Grove. He is someone who extols the virtue of teamwork and doesn't tend to emphasise his own part in the equation.

But veteran Williams driver Felipe Massa has already felt the benefit of Lowe's homecoming.

"He is very close to all the [technical] areas," explains Massa.

"We had so many issues that maybe we find a piece in the windtunnel that is working, but then it is taking a long time to build that rear wing or front wing, so the production is not doing quick job, so he is doing a lot to improve the time producing the pieces.

"But also putting all the areas a little bit closer together. For example, one problem we had for Monaco is that we are missing downforce, we need to do a completely different rear wing, a bigger rear wing, just for this type of track, and it is something when I arrive from Ferrari [at the end of 2013], I said, 'Why don't we have a bigger wing, to have more downforce?' and we never had in these [last] three years.

"This year, at the beginning of the season, we were preparing the wing but it was not ready for Monaco, because from when he arrived there was not enough time.

"All the problems we have at these tracks it should be better in the future, because we are preparing things in a better way. He is helping to solve all the issues.

"We are not going to win, because Mercedes and Ferrari are far away in front, but the work and the development is much better now - just putting on all the parts, talking the same language.

"He is a very calm guy, he is not putting on pressure, he is trying to improve, trying to make better all the areas that are not really perfect for the moment.

"I like him a lot - I never worked with him before, but I always wanted to work with him because he is a big talent."

Massa's example shows the scale of the challenge Lowe faces at Williams. If the team can correct its aerodynamic shortfall and ally that to the best engine in F1 (which it already possesses), there shouldn't be much left standing in its way.

Lowe points to the shining example of Red Bull as the customer team that conquered the world several times. It can be done, and that's where Williams should be aiming, but he also concedes that Williams may need to look for a manufacturer partnership to take the next leap forward.

"I think some of it boils down to financing actually, rather than the technical aspects," explains Lowe.

"If you look at most of those examples where teams are more successful under a works arrangement, it's because the team has been underpinned by strong financial support from the manufacturer.

"Particularly nowadays, where the engines by regulation are identical across works and customer teams, then it's actually the financial support and sometimes the technical support from the manufacturer's own engineering teams that can be one of the bigger advantages in that sort of relationship.

"That example is clear in the case of McLaren, where one of the advantages they have is the financial support from Honda."

But McLaren has gone backwards despite that financial and technical 'support'...

"You can't have your cake and eat it," counters Lowe. "I've heard people say, 'When you put such-and-such engine in a McLaren it'd win all the races', but they've built that car with a lot of financial support from Honda. You can't have both."

So where does that leave Williams? There are only four manufacturers in F1 presently, all with works operations already, and there doesn't appear to be an appetite from outsiders to come on board any time soon.

When Williams seems to have no choice but to remain one of F1's second-class citizens in the medium term, how can Lowe reconcile this reality with the team's winning ambitions?

"I don't have an answer to that," he concedes. "It's something we will work away at bit by bit, one step at a time.

"It might be that seeking to partner with a manufacturer could be a thing for us in due course; then again you have to make yourselves attractive to that possibility.

"So it comes back always to the same thing - you've got to do the best job with what you've got. To take on the big three, the first point is to be beating everyone else. That's very much the initial focus.

"There are areas that we definitely need to increase our level of resources as we can afford it. When you look at the differences between the budgets of the leading teams and what we have at the moment, that will reflect in a level of staffing in lots of other areas.

"There's a big gap there, and that means you've got fewer hours in the day to do more work to make the car quicker. So, as we can afford it, we will build in the areas that matter. But again, the focus has got to be on efficiency."

So it seems for now, until F1's engine rules change in such a way that more manufacturers are lining up to join in the fun (2020 at the earliest), or Liberty Media starts distributing the fruits of F1's labour more evenly (after '20 at the earliest), Lowe will surely have to temper his and Williams's ultimate ambitions and focus on competing in a different kind of F1 to the one he became used to winning so regularly at Mercedes.

At Williams Lowe has new challenges to meet - dealing with severe midfield budget limitations, the unique presence of Lance Stroll and the money (and the influence it buys) his family brings to the team, plus the need to restore to the team a confidence that has been gradually eroded by years of underachievement.

"It's very easy, because everything you do you're actually working locally within a certain set of constraints," says Lowe. "It's amazing how quickly you recalibrate to where you are and what immediate success looks like.

"The reward comes by moving forward. That can be just as satisfying as being able to sustain a winning position that you already established. It's actually just the same game really.

"The only time I noticed it this season, I hadn't realised it before but I'm a bit of an addict of purple sectors. There's something incredibly addictive and very, very rewarding about that moment you've built a great car and it's in the hands of a fantastic driver, and he's out there wringing its neck in qualifying and you see the purples pop up.

"That's the point you go, 'Yeah, that's what it's all about!'. That is actually far more satisfying than any number of cups, or chequered flags, or whatever - because for the engineer it's about making a car that's really quick and the final test of that is the stopwatch.

"There are a few times this year, you're looking at the screen and see the purples running along and you say, 'Oh shit, they're not mine! Bastards, it's someone else!' But we'll get back there, that's what we're here for."

In which case it must gall Lowe - a man who has sampled the addictive taste of success so regularly in recent seasons - to sit in relative obscurity while his colleagues battle Ferrari to remain on top of the pile.

"I really enjoyed my time at Mercedes - I'll look back on my years there for the rest of my life with enormous satisfaction," he says.

"The team was almost faultless in what they did and how they did it, and it was a great privilege to work with them.

"But I reached a point where there was an opportunity for a new challenge, do something a bit different - particularly around becoming more of an owner rather than simply an employee.

"A chance came up and I've taken it. I've got no regrets, got some exciting work ahead, I'm looking forward to moving forwards."

That's all Lowe and Williams can do for now. Time will tell whether they can make the changes needed to restore this team to its former glory, or whether that's even possible.

Success or no, Lowe is in for the long haul - and he'll certainly enjoy trying.