Williams sure recovery has begun

With the Brazilian finishing ninth in the street race, and his team-mate Pastor Maldonado running sixth in the late stages before he was taken out in an accident with Lewis Hamilton, Barrichello admitted that he was encouraged by the team's performance.

"I think we are back to last year in the way that we are going to qualify better and not race as strongly," he told AUTOSPORT. "So we need to change that around, but I am happy with the conditions so far.

"We have a new front wing, we have something going on for Canada which is a place I love. So I just have to keep on scoring a lot!"

And Barrichello believes that he could have finished even higher if he had not been caught out by the first safety car period.

"I drove well, it was a good race, but unfortunately the safety car did not play well into my hands for my one stop," he said. "I only stopped the second time because I had space in between when there was the other safety car. I should have finished a lot further towards the front and I was catching all those guys.

I enjoyed it very much, but it was very frustrating to see straight after the safety car that I was one lap down in 12th! With the safety car there is no middle ground, it either helps or it does not help. This time it did not help.

"I am frustrated to see that Pastor did not finish because we would have had a lot more points in the bag but I am happy to have scored some points."

Head admitted to AUTOSPORT that he was expecting Williams to have an upturn in form now that more developments are coming on stream.

"As with all the other teams, we are developing the car and we expect to have a much stronger season from the next couple of races onwards," he said. "I mean yes we've had a pretty awful start to the season but Williams is a professional racing team and we don't have doom and gloom merchants internally we just get our heads down and get on with it.

"Every track we go to represents our capability at that track and if we are not fast enough to get into Q3, that's the way it is until we make the car faster. Quite clearly the car had some problems at the beginning of the year but steadily we are working those problems out of it."

Head added that the team is still working on its own version of an exhaust-blown diffuser similar to that used by Red Bull.

"We've got some upgrade but then so have other people and we've been introducing an undertray of a similar type with exhaust-blowing of a similar type to Red Bull, but we haven't actually got it to the extent yet that we are happy to race it," he said. "So you can look in advance and say this is a major, major upgrade because this is what they've got up the road there, but we haven't actually brought it to the party in a way that we can race it yet. When we do... it's not reliability, it's different aspects of the performance [that it depends on].

"Some aspects we can see clearly are better and some aren't, and small detail changes will bring it into the area where we can say after a Friday, okay yes we can take it forward into Saturday and to qualifying, and to the race."