How Williams ended up so far behind

When George Russell finally rolled the new Williams FW42 onto the track at the start of the third afternoon of 2019 pre-season testing for the first of 22 tentative initial laps last week, it was the beginning of a game of catch-up.

Since then, the car has covered plenty of ground, but there's nothing yet in the lap times that suggests it's going to be anything other than back-of-the-grid fodder come the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

A late and uncompetitive car was not what the team was hoping for from a machine it hoped would banish the memory of a dreadful 2018 season. So what has gone wrong?

Williams is reviewing exactly what caused the car to be late so won't publicly comment on the reasons. But deputy team principal Claire Williams has emphatically stated it was not because of outside suppliers being late, as some have suggested. This means it's all on Williams, with talk that the delays built up throughout the process - going right back to the design office as well as subsequent steps.

Chief technical officer Paddy Lowe, whose future was the subject of much speculation last week, also won't comment on the specific causes of the delay. As he's pointed out, Williams isn't the first team not to have a car ready as planned - although that happening has increasingly become a rarity. Even so, there were other teams battling a tight schedule, including Renault, which only just made its weekend pre-test shakedown, and Racing Point. That doesn't excuse the Williams being late, but at least it makes it more understandable.

What is clear is that the Williams delay wasn't down to a specific problem, but appears to have mounted up through multiple stages of the process all the way back to the design office.

On factor highlighted by Lowe is that the team was "caught out" by the ever-growing complexity of modern F1 cars.

"There is a general trend that the cars get more complicated, so that's the number of parts," Lowe tells Autosport in an exclusive interview in the Williams motorhome, just after facing his first media scrum over his team's current drama.

Being late is not automatically a harbinger of doom. What is more concerning is that car hasn't looked quick

"Then each individual part you'll find has more detail on it. And it's not just that, every part then has behind it tooling or jigs or fixtures, which don't arrive on the car but that's another payload. That does increase year-on-year irrespective of the regulations.

"Regulations may create some blips, the front wing is simpler than last year, but that's more than compensated for by complexity in the bargeboard area. It's on the mechanical areas as well, every bracket and widget.

"Without analysing all the factors and particular causes of being late, just on a macro level, the fact there are more parts that are more complex has given more load to the system and consequently the system couldn't carry the load. You've got to make a lot of bits and we didn't make them all in time."

Williams failed to make both its planned pre-test shakedown and the start of running, so by definition this is a failure and changes will be made to ensure there's no repeat. But in itself this is not automatically a harbinger of doom as some contend. What is, at this stage, more concerning is that car hasn't looked quick.

The fastest time we've seen from a Williams so far is George Russell's 1m18.130s, set on the softest compound 5 Pirellis on Thursday. That's slowest of all, and there's no sign in the long runs of anything that makes it stronger.

Lowe won't comment on the pace of the car, beyond saying that the team is not yet sure of its true speed as there's still more to come from it. But even with what he describes as a "modest" upgrade for Melbourne it's hard to see Williams as anything other than the team at the back.

Being at the back is clearly a bad thing, potentially disastrous for a team such as Williams, which just endured the worst season in its history as an F1 constructor and is dependent on luring significant sponsorship dollars. But given the context of where the team is coming from, there might be a silver lining.

In testing last year, the Williams FW41 was unstable, uncompetitive and problematic. It continued to be so for much of the season and it was clear that not only was the car lacking in downforce, but it was also too sensitive in its aerodynamic and also mechanical performance. That's why Williams never really made significant progress with the car. It was a symptom of a team that was not working as it should.

If - and it's still an if at the moment - the 2019 car is basically working well, but lacking in overall aerodynamic load and therefore lacking speed, then it could yet validate the changes made to the team last year. More downforce can potentially be bolted onto a solid, predictable car. Trying to do so on a peaky car that its creator does not fully understand is even harder.

In particular, it's a test of the focus on improving the processes by which windtunnel and CFD data is analysed and fed into the design process. In short, there's a difference between a slow car that works, and a slow car that doesn't work, even if the results are similar.

"The key thing for me is to actually be moving forwards in the fundamentals of how we go about things," says Lowe when asked if it will be tolerable to start off at the back if the car is working as hoped. "The way to solve your problems in Formula 1 is not to run around firefighting, panicking and rushing into doing the wrong things, it's actually about building a winning system.

"What I'm most keen to do is put in place and build, brick by brick, the elements of a winning system. So the most important thing for me to see this season is some of those foundations starting to show through in the quality and the performance of the parts that we make.

"Where that leaves us competitively is important, but this has a habit of being quite an impatient sport and you have got to constantly fight that because if you put all that attention around that impatience you actually end up doing all the wrong things. And if you do all the wrong things you go backwards.

"So you have to find that balance around the immediate competitiveness and what you are doing with it, but also building this winning system."

What is striking about the Williams is that it's not a back-to-basics model after last year's trouble. The front and rear suspension designs have caught the eye, particularly the elegant Mercedes-style top wishbone approach with the pick-up shrouded inside the wheel that takes this design to a new level - as indicated in Giorgio Piola's illustration above.

The car is a little bulbous in its midriff on the engine cover, but Lowe explains this is down to a conservative approach to cooling given that this was a problem last year. The idea is that cooling must not be something to worry about this year.

Lowe insists that Williams is set to complete the same mileage by the end of testing as it would have done had it hit the track on day one

"There's a few details on the car that we're very proud of actually," says Lowe. "Some less proud, but that's the nature of it this time of year. I've always enjoyed innovation and a lot of what we're trying to put in place is what you call the basic building blocks of a winning process. But surrounding it, it's always very rewarding and necessary to overlay innovation.

"There's things that we're doing around the car as well as on it, which are highly innovative and not been done by any other team so far and that not only helps us but it's satisfying and rewarding for the individuals involved. There's some nice details there so we'll see where they pan out."

On track, the car doesn't look to be battling any significant balance problems. It's markedly better than how the Williams looked at this stage last season, with its 2019 drivers able to be more decisive on turn in.

Where it is clearly lacking is in downforce, so the speed being carried through the corners by Russell and Robert Kubica is reduced compared to those populating the midfield.

Lowe talks up the way the car is working dynamically, which suggests the FW42 is making sense and functioning properly in its fundamental characteristics. Kubica is positive about the feel of the 2019 car versus last year's FW41, which raises hopes that if downforce can be piled onto the new design then the development rate can move it forward. Whether that's good enough to close the gap to the midfield is impossible to say because it's a moving target.

Lowe accepts that there is an impact on data analysis when what should have been eight days of work is compressed into five-and-a-half, but he insists that Williams is set to complete the same mileage by the end of testing as it would have done had it hit the track on day one and will use all available tyres as planned too.

Williams has covered a total of 477 laps, which is only 44 behind next-worst Racing Point but well behind the 1058 logged by Mercedes. With another marathon day on Friday (it covered 140 laps on Thursday) Williams should at least reach a reasonable level even if it would surely have covered greater mileage given an on-time start.

Everything Lowe says makes sense, and this could simply be a 'zero' point for a recovering team that has taken one step back to go two forwards. But we won't be sure whether it's that or the symptom of an ongoing malaise until the season gets into full swing.

He's right that starting slowly can be put up with provided the fundamentals underpinning the car, and the way the team is working, are right. If the building blocks are in place, the hope is that Williams is building on firm ground.

"You're not building on sand is a great way of putting it," says Lowe when that analogy is suggested. "That's kind of what we did last year. Some of the things, in retrospect, from last year were of the nature of building on sand and we would have been better off had we just regrouped and put that effort onto a more fundamental level in terms of development."

So how can we tell if Williams is on the right track or if this is just the latest symptom of a team that's fading into irrelevance after the false dawn of the early years of the hybrid era? The honest answer is we can't.

The trouble is with taking one step back to go forwards is that there's always a point where all you can see is the stride rearwards and you don't know whether it's followed by another step in the wrong direction or two in the right one.

Everything Lowe says about the team, and where it is, is logical and it could be that if, as it surely will, Williams starts off slowest in Melbourne it is the foundation stone for a longer-term recovery. Then it's a question of whether Williams has the budget to develop the car quickly enough and keep pace with its rivals. That's another matter entirely.

That will be the true test of the Williams team, and ultimately the ambitious technical changes he has overseen will define Paddy Lowe's long-term success. In the grand scheme of things, producing a car a few days late is bad, being uncompetitive at the start of the season is very bad, but both can be accepted as a one-off if the team as a whole is pointing in the right direction.

But if the direction isn't right and what happens in the coming season proves the team hasn't built a firm foundation, it could prove to be a disastrous year. Williams can't afford another 2018.