F1's brutal nature laid bare by Williams's plight

Like time and tide, Formula 1 waits for no-one. Williams found this out the hard way earlier this week when delays to the build of its FW42 left it facing a battle to get the car out to Barcelona for the beginning of pre-season testing.

Eventually, after a mammoth effort in the race bays at Grove, a dash to Birmingham airport, a flight to Girona on an Antonov AN-26B that got in at 2.15am, and then a 4am arrival at the circuit, George Russell was finally able to hit the track on Wednesday afternoon.

In many other businesses, being slightly late to deliver a product would not raise any eyebrows. New mobile phones, films, computer games or the latest gadgets often slip past projected release dates. When it happens, most people just shrug their shoulders and wait it out - life moves on.

In F1, though, such a relaxed attitude is not an option. In a championship that's such an intense battleground, there's no second chance to get something right: miss jumping on the train and by the time you know what's happened, it's long gone and the station is shut.

A miscalculation in a car's production schedule quickly snowballs into a delay to the build, and then the window of opportunity to make the start of testing fast disappears.

Suddenly, what was a slightly nervous time trying to hit deadlines - which almost all teams go through as things are pushed to the limit - transforms into the harsh realisation that things have gone very wrong.

"It became apparent quite late on actually that we weren't going to make the shakedown and subsequently not make the first day," admitted team boss Claire Williams.

"We thought we could get everything we needed together in order to make Tuesday. And then parts just weren't coming through as we hoped they would and in the time we hoped they would or had in the plan.

"But I'm not going to go into any detail as to why that happened. I don't think it's appropriate to discuss the ins and outs of what went wrong.

"Completing that inquest anyway has not happened at Grove yet. We're clearly aware of some of the issues, but it's too early to start discussing them in any detail and probably something we wouldn't do anyway. We need to resolve what went wrong so this doesn't happen again."

Williams wasn't the only team to have faced dramas in getting ready for the first test. Renault, in particular, had been up against it to get the RS19 into shape for a weekend shakedown.

One of F1's attractions is that the quality of competition is so high it demands the best of everybody. It's not an exercise in being nice, a popularity contest or a place for those giving any less than 100%

The French car manufacturer's technical director, Nick Chester, said he had some sympathy for Williams's plight, as it is hard to grasp how complicated the process is to build a new car from the outside.

"Oh yeah, absolutely, it is really hard," he said. "Unless you've lived through multiple car builds, you wouldn't realise how hard it is and how many parts are delivered right at the last minute.

"The production guys do an absolutely fantastic job. They are chasing thousands of parts in the period of one or two weeks. They have everything turning up at nearly the same time and it is super, super busy.

"You only need one or two problems to be four or five days late, so it's a big challenge."

But no matter how intense the process is to get a car ready, how complicated it is producing and fitting the thousands of parts, and how cutting-edge the engineering exercise is in pulling it all together, anything less than perfection in F1 quickly gets exposed as a major weakness.

Indeed, that's one of F1's attractions: the quality of competition is so high that it demands the best of everybody. It's not an exercise in being nice; it's not a popularity contest and it's not a place for those giving any less than 100%.

For Binotto, such management weaknesses as those that occurred at Ferrari last year cannot be tolerated when you are going up against a team as strong as Mercedes

And that's as true for teams facing immediate difficulties, such as Williams, as it is for drivers fighting at the front of the field.

It was interesting last week to hear new Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto be immediately direct that, with Charles Leclerc lacking experience, his team was set to throw its weight behind Sebastian Vettel at the start of the campaign.

"Charles still has to learn, as pointed out by himself, but we know how talented he is," said Binotto. "I think it's normal, especially early in the season, that if there are particular situations our priority will be Sebastian, he is the guide we are aiming for the championship.

"Without prejudice, the absolute priority is for Ferrari to win. Anyway, I hope to have such a problem... or two drivers to manage in the top positions."

For F1's fans, the prospect of a top team heading into the season openly admitting that team orders are on the cards may sound far from appealing (as it will for Leclerc), but the reality is that Binotto fully understands that such hardline tactics may be a necessity.

Last year, it was Ferrari's failure to be decisive on team orders that proved so costly in opening the door for Lewis Hamilton. Had it acted sooner to let Vettel past Kimi Raikkonen on the different strategies in the German Grand Prix, then Vettel may not have felt under so much pressure to push in the wet conditions later on and ultimately throw away a victory.

The most obvious open goal came at Monza, however, when Ferrari's failure to put its full support behind Vettel meant it was Raikkonen who started on pole, triggering the first-lap battle that left the door open for eventual race-winner Hamilton's decisive move at the second chicane.

For Binotto, such management weaknesses cannot be tolerated when you are going up against a team as strong as Mercedes. Especially when that team showed itself to be willing to do the unpopular thing as it ordered Valtteri Bottas to give up a win in Russia to help Hamilton's title campaign.

As Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said at the time, better to be the baddie on the Sunday night than an idiot at the end of the year.

While it isn't true to say that only bad guys can win, what is correct is that F1 doesn't tolerate weakness. Slip up on the technical front, make a management mistake, mess up as a driver, and you aren't going to win.

It's been one of the sport's constants. And however painful it may be at times, and however much it has hurt Williams this week, nobody who works in or follows the series would have it any other way.