What Williams can target after breaking F1's "golden rule"

Robert Kubica is marooned at the back of the field in what was meant to be a celebrated Formula 1 comeback after eight years away because of a rally crash that could have killed him. Frustration and self-pity could easily have set in during his struggle to show what he feels is his true ability.

Yet Kubica does not believe he and rookie team-mate George Russell are the only victims of Williams's plight. And he pulls no punches when he explains the true impact of a team breaking what he believes is F1's "golden rule": having good car performance.

"When the car performance is good, the drivers are good, the engineers are good, the strategy is easier, the tyres are working better - the food is better! The travel office works better, although you have to wait five hours in Dubai," Kubica tells Autosport.

"If [with the] same people the car performance is three seconds [slower], the drivers are making mistakes, the engineers don't understand, the strategy is wrong because the tyres are not lasting, the food, although it is the same, is not good and the travel office [is worse as well]."

It's easy to see how this could set in at Williams. F1 is incredibly complicated, but it boils down to a few simple numbers: those on the timing screen and in the championship standings.

Neither makes good reading for Williams so far. Its average deficit to the fastest car in Q1 is 2.73 seconds, and to its nearest rival it's 1.26s. Its best race result is 15th. It is the only team that has not scored a point and, barring a miraculous turnaround, already seems set for last in the constructors' championship for the second year in a row.

"It's not that we have to throw everything into the bin, but you have to be realistic" Robert Kubica

Digging beyond the headline numbers is not much fun either. Former F1 team technical director Gary Anderson's favoured supertime method - taking each team's fastest individual lap over a grand prix weekend and expressing it as a percentage of the outright quickest - makes for similarly tough reading.

Williams's 2019 supertime so far is 104.43%. The benchmark, Mercedes, is 100.12% and Williams's closest rival, Racing Point, is at 102.20%.

No team has had a worse supertime than Williams's early 2019 average since Manor Marussia (pictured below) in 2015, although Sauber got quite close in 2017 (104.19%) with a bad car and a year-old engine.

As Sauber (now Alfa Romeo) has proven, the right decisions and alliances can very quickly turn a team's fortunes around. But whether Williams should adopt such a strategy to boost its longer-term prospects is a conversation for another day. This season it's limited in what it can achieve.

"Those numbers have a big effect on everything and if your numbers are bad or you are much slower, it can reflect on all the team," says Kubica of lap time.

"It's not that we have to throw everything into the bin, but you have to be realistic, have a plan, you have to have [an understanding] this is the direction, these are realistic targets and let's try to achieve them."

Williams has preached patience since the start of the year, since its car arrived at pre-season testing late, was slow when it got there, and then turned out to have some illegal parts on it.

The first priority became simply making the car pass scrutineering. Now it's about making it fit for purpose in a different sense, and trying to raise what counts as a "realistic target". This weekend in Baku could be the best chance to do that.

While 2019 is undeniably worse for Williams so far than '18, last year was still pretty bad. At this stage of the season it had a supertime of 103.65%. Only Sauber's was worse, but that team was able to develop massively through the year and ended it a regular top 10 threat.

Williams did not, but it was still able to score points in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. The team has a strong record in Baku, where last year Lance Stroll was able to qualify 11th and score his first points of the year in eighth.

In a generally disappointing - by its standards at the time - 2017 season (pictured above), Williams had its sole podium of the year in Azerbaijan with Stroll and felt it could have won with Felipe Massa but for a damper failure. The circumstances of a wild race helped, but it was one of the only times that season Williams was anywhere near close enough to the front to capitalise on such events.

Williams had a smaller leap to make 12 months ago compared to now, but it was still a very big jump. In Baku its supertime last year was 102.06%: a gain of 1.3% in performance relative to the first three races.

This year's Williams does not produce a lot of performance, but it does seem more stable than last year's unpredictable machine. If, and it is a big if, that's enough to allow Williams to replicate the sort of performance step in Baku, then it could briefly put itself back in the mix. The downside is that the 2019 car generates a lot of drag without a downforce advantage during the corners, which could negate the usual step Williams makes in Baku. But anything like the 1.3% gain last year would launch Williams from miles adrift of the rest of the grid to around Toro Rosso/Racing Point's level in the supertime rankings.

Trading a lonely Sunday afternoon for a battle - any battle - could be a big factor in shifting the negative spiral

Whether that's possible or not this weekend, Kubica must think that's realistic at some stage, as he has not completely ruled out scoring points at some point this season.

"Everything is possible in Formula 1," he says. "But there is no magic. Nothing happens without reason, so I think if we get this sweet-spot and maybe be lucky with some things, [points] might come; but as I said, there is no magic."

Just because Williams is back at a circuit that has been kind to it in the past does not suddenly transform a realistic target from being on the back row of the grid into making the giddy heights of Q2 and having a sniff at the points.

What it would benefit from hugely is if its traditional strength in Baku can at least give its drivers and its team one weekend early in this terrible start to the season where it can fight with someone else.

Trading a lonely Sunday afternoon for a battle - any battle - could be a big factor in shifting the sort of negative spiral that Kubica has referred to into something more positive. Then the team can build from there.

Baku is the sort of place where nothing can turn into something quite quickly. Kubica's right: there is no magic in F1 and pulling a rabbit out of a hat is going to be difficult for Williams.

But if it's going to happen at all this season, then maybe it's this weekend.