Williams vow to attack in Malaysia

Although Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg took sixth and seventh place at Sakhir, the team believe they could have been fighting with Renault, Ferrari, Honda and McLaren if they had not headed into the season-opener so pessimistic about their form.

That attitude resulted in them deciding to run Webber with a very heavy fuel load in qualifying - which ultimately ruled him out of the battle for a podium finish. Rosberg's hopes were dashed by a first corner incident with Nick Heidfeld.

"We probably under-estimated our true performance and we ran a lot of fuel in the car and qualified too heavily," Williams co-owner Patrick Head told autosport.com. "We are going to take a more aggressive approach in Malaysia."

With aerodynamic upgrades due to be fitted to their FW28 in Malaysia, including new sidepod parts and chimney winglets, the team have vowed to go all-out for success at Sepang.

Williams technical director Sam Michael said: "We went into Bahrain with no-one talking about Williams at all to be honest, and I think that brings an element of doubt into the team.

"Inevitably that puts you onto conservative decisions, whether it is about set-up or strategy or tyres and definitely we were too conservative in Bahrain. People didn't quite have the confidence they should have done, but this weekend will be a different story.

"We will turn everything on for Malaysia."