Is Williams capable of the change it needs?

There was nowhere for Williams to hide in 2018. Not only did the team finish 10th and last in the world championship, but it did so by a significant margin. Even with its endless grid penalties, ninth-placed Toro Rosso scored nearly five times as many points as Williams did.

The days of Williams challenging for podiums in the early years of Formula 1's hybrid era suddenly seem like a long time ago, and having hit rock bottom, the only way forward is surely through change. That's easy to say, but making it happen will be difficult.

Frank and Claire Williams, and CEO Mike O'Driscoll can only do so much. The man ultimately responsible for turning things around is chief technical officer Paddy Lowe, who returned to the team in March 2017 after contributing to three double title wins at Mercedes.

When Lowe arrived, it was natural to assume that a Williams upturn would follow - after all, he knew all the secrets of the works Mercedes team's success. It was logical to expect that heading into 2018 he'd bring something special to Williams, as the FW41 would be "Paddy's car" - the first that he'd been able to contribute to.

But it didn't work out that way. The car was born with fundamental aerodynamic issues that never really went away.

Early in the season chief designer Ed Wood and aero head Dirk de Beer both departed, and there was no clearer indication of the deep-seated engineering problems. Lowe is tasked with addressing those, but he knows he can't do it by himself.

"I came to Williams to try and make a difference, along with colleagues," he says. "Working in a team is not a single-handed business, we need a lot of strong players - at senior management and within the technical areas - to get the job done. The mission for me along with my colleagues is to turn this team around, but I can't put any timescale on that."

Organisations can always learn from adversity - if they are willing to. Lowe insists that the barrel scraping of 2018 will have a positive impact for Williams.

"It's been a very difficult year for Williams, extremely difficult," he says. "But in many ways, which sounds curious, a good year. It's provided a context and a reason and a motivation to make significant changes to how we do things. From 10th as a team, it gets people's attention that there's a lot of work to do.

"And it's not trivial work, it's not some small thing that just gets you from here. There are substantial changes needed in the company to get us to where we want to be, towards the front. I don't think that mindset has been present in the team for many years, if ever, and that is the mindset that's necessary."

"The underlying performance at Williams hasn't been where it's needed to be for a very long time" Paddy Lowe

While change is clearly needed, it's not easy to bring it about in a team with such history, and which has not undergone any major transition along the lines of Jaguar morphing into Red Bull, or BAR/Honda/Brawn into Mercedes. It took a while in each case, but huge success followed at those squads.

Sometimes it takes new ownership and a fresh identity to create a proper shift in culture, even if many of the people in the trenches are the same ones that worked away without success for years. There are many now five-time title winners at Brackley who were there when the team finished ninth as Honda in 2008.

Sauber and Force India are both undergoing that rebuilding process following changes of ownership, but for Williams there is no external influence. That change must be generated from within.

"Williams is a team of great heritage, 41 years now in F1, some terrific success, but almost all of it in the first 20 years," says Lowe. "That history and that heritage is both a great asset but also can be a burden, for every bit of experience comes sometimes with an inability to consider change.

"And F1 is characterised as a very fast moving business. If you look in our museum in Grove, it's a tremendous museum with 40 years of history in a row. What you see is a lot of change in the technology of the cars. And that's being reflected back in the office, in the factory, how you do stuff, and it continues all the time in the sport today.

"If you're not keeping on modernising, doing things differently, more and more technically and more professionally, then you're going to be slipping behind and losing. Williams needs to make a lot of these changes, and this year has focussed everybody's minds on that necessity.

"The good thing is everybody is embracing that and going with it. I can't put numbers on it, I'm not going to say that we'll come 'X' position or something, all I can tell you is we'll be better, because the ship is turning in the right direction."

Intriguingly, Lowe reckons that there hasn't been a sudden downturn that led to the poor 2018. Williams may have finished third as recently as 2014 and '15, but it had the benefit of the best engine at a time when teams without Mercedes power were struggling. The inherent problems were already there.

"There have been good years and bad years relatively, and they can be explained by different factors that come or go in your favour," he says. "The underlying point is that we haven't been competing in the way that you need to compete to win, which is our objective. We have essentially been making up the numbers.

"We won a race in 2012, but I think you'll agree that it was an isolated result. The [last] win before that was 2004, a long time ago. Yes, we've had some reasonably good years. As an example, '14 was a good year, but we were flattered by a good engine. Other teams, for their own reasons, didn't have a good year. The underlying performance hasn't been where it's needed to be for a very long time."

So, what's gone wrong? That's obviously a question that cannot be answered in one soundbite.

"There's a hundred reasons," Lowe says. "There's a hundred reasons in the car, and there's a hundred reasons in the process by which we design and develop cars. That's the point. There's no silver bullet, it's not about we just do this and everything will be alright, and this is what's taken a little while to discover.

"That's been the process of discovery, that it's a hundred reasons, or five hundred reasons, and they're not simply about making a different choice on the car about a radius or a tyre pressure, it's about changing how we do things in our engineering.

"We're upgrading everywhere. It's not only about investment, it's about process, the design process, and even culture. There's a huge amount of change going on, but it's only starting. These things take a long time.

"The first thing you've got to do is change your engineering, and then when you've changed that, you start making better products - your racing cars. Even to make the changes in the organisation takes time, and for those effects to come through won't be instantaneous."

"Williams's history and experience is a great advantage to us, but can also be a disadvantage, because people need refreshment in terms of ideas and approach" Paddy Lowe

The big challenge is that Williams is aiming at a moving target. The team is better resourced and sharper than it was 20, 10 or even five years ago, but everybody else has moved on. Having been part of that growing process at Mercedes, Lowe knows how well-equipped the biggest teams now are.

"The thing to remember is that the other nine teams are all very strong," he explains. "F1 has incredibly strong technology base now, every team is populated by the brightest engineers from the best universities. They are run by good management teams, they're all very well structured. It wasn't always like that.

"It's difficult to know the best way to say this, but even to come 10th in F1 now, and actually be in touch with the [rest of the] grid, is a very difficult job, because of the standard. We tend to think that it's just straightforward and easy to do better than that. I'm very optimistic that we are already moving forwards, and that will translate in due course into better results."

Engineers quietly come and go from teams all the time, but we haven't seen any high-profile names being appointed to replace Wood and de Beer. At Williams, there has been more of a focus on giving in-house talent a chance and using people more effectively.

"Part of the story of getting our process and organisation in shape has been about building a different organisation and moving on in some areas," Lowe continues. "Things have been a bit static for too long as well.

"There's some really good people in the team with some terrific experience. The team has been around a long time, and what's incredible is how long many of the same employees have been in there. That shows a tremendous loyalty, and I think ultimately that's quite a lot down to Frank and the personality of Frank, and the sportsmanship that he represents.

"It's a great advantage to us, but can also be a disadvantage, because people need refreshment in terms of ideas and approach, and you need sometimes the new DNA from outside to bring in a new way of thinking.

"Many of the engineers within Williams are some of the most experienced engineers in the sport and what we're trying to do is get the most of all of that. It's taking advantage of all that experience to harness it in a fresh way - with a fresh structure and fresh approach. That's the journey we are on at the moment, and I think it will yield fantastic results in the future."

Another recently-announced high-profile departure was that of Rob Smedley, whose role will be absorbed by an internal shuffle.

"At the moment, we have no external appointments planned," Lowe says of Williams's immediate hiring approach. "We have a lot of engineers, there's depth in the team, and we will restructure ourselves around people we already have in place. And we all do things differently.

"For me there's no such thing as a perfect organisation chart. Generally you create organisations around real people, because real people have their own ability, their own skills, and you have to come at it that way round. We don't have a Rob Smedley but we have a lot of other individuals with different names who have different capabilities and we'll restructure to play to their strengths."

Lowe insists that Williams still has the resources with which to compete at the front - but reckons they must be utilised more effectively.

"The really good news is that the team has got the right foundations to be successful," he says. "We've got Frank and all that he brings - a great spirit - a very experienced and loyal staff, a fantastic facility. We own our own land and buildings on it, which many teams don't, and within that we've got a terrific windtunnel - one of the best in the sport. So, we have the big elements there. The point is more about how we use them.

"A windtunnel is only ever an experiment, a simulation of what a car does on track, and it's a pretty poor simulation as it happens. But it's as good as you can get, and we complement it with CFD, which is the digital version, and it's a matter of how you use the information and what you decide matters and what you decide doesn't.

"It's a very complicated science, and it's under constant development as well. The way people used tunnels 10 years ago is very different to how they use them now and the 10 teams have become better at developing the way they use their tools. You develop the process, and that's the thing that makes you produce winning cars."

The hiring of George Russell and Robert Kubica also sends an important signal, internally as well as to the outside world. So, will the pain of 2018 pay dividends in the longer term? Lowe is convinced that it will.

"As you get your head around it," he says, "And the whole company gets our head around it, you go through the mourning of 'how the hell did we get here?' You then come back up the other side and say, 'Right, that means we've got to do some stuff.'

"We've gone through that phase now, and we've got all the promise of converting a terrible season into a much better future for the long term."