Where next for Williams after failed Lowe gamble

Two years ago, Paddy Lowe was the messiah for Williams. The return to a team where he had once played a key role in the successful active ride programme was supposed to set Williams back on the path to the good times.

Today, that hope lies in tatters with Lowe stepping away for "personal reasons" - presumably to be followed by leaving his position officially once the details of a complicated separation are finalised. A car that was late for pre-season testing could be tolerated. One that was slow, perhaps even with question marks over whether some tweaks need to be made to ensure legality, it turns out, could not. Williams staked several million pounds a year on Lowe being the man to turn things around, but that gamble failed.

This is just Williams's latest failure to set the direction of its technical leadership in the 21st century, one that stretches all the way back to Patrick Head, the inspirational engineering key at the heart of the team's success, handing over the reigns to Sam Michael in 2004 and becoming engineering director as he transitioned towards retirement.

Realistically, the rot started at Williams before that, specifically with Adrian Newey leaving for McLaren - something that Frank Williams later admitted was "arguably, with hindsight, a mistake".

In the interim, multiple senior technical personnel, including Mark Gillan, Mike Coughlan and Pat Symonds, have tried to turn things around in various technical roles and ultimately moved on for various reasons. Lowe is the latest to fall. All of these names are people with good CVs and genuine skillsets, yet none has made their time at Williams anything other than temporary.

Lowe was regarded from the outside as a dead man walking at Barcelona testing after the car was late. But he didn't look like one. Chatting to him before an interview, he described pre-season as a difficult period where you are always treading on landmines, and there had certainly been a few of those this year. But while pre-season had been tough, and he was obviously well aware of how precarious his situation was, he probably wasn't expecting this final landmine to go off so quickly.

"This sport has a habit of being quite impatient 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" Paddy Lowe

He had the air of someone who expected at least to have a few more months to prove that the direction he had set the team on was working, that the promise he saw in the car was real. Whether that confidence was misplaced is another matter, but clearly the prevailing feeling among the rest of the team's management was that it was.

What he said about the team at the second Barcelona test is inarguable. With significant changes made to the team's processes, particularly when it came to how windtunnel and CFD data was used to drive aerodynamic development, this car was an acid test of the changes he had brought in.

"The key thing for me is to actually be moving forwards in the fundamentals of how we go about things," said Lowe during that second test. "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, because this is a sport where we have a lot of stakeholders, not least our sponsors, and we do need to keep pushing as hard as we can to try to be competitive.

"But this sport has a habit of being quite impatient 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."

Looking back on what Lowe said then, it's clear that the pressures from the team's stakeholders have played a key role in his departure. It will be a costly move, not only financially but also because it creates a vacuum in technical leadership.

Williams will not be an appealing destination for a proven technical director, meaning the team might have to be creative in who it appoints. Whether it promotes from within or brings in someone from the outside remains to be seen but Williams cannot continue to have a revolving door for technical leadership like a dysfunctional football club for much longer.

The rest of the technical structure apparently remains in place. The most senior is chief engineer Doug McKiernan, who joined Williams in February 2018. He, together with the other technical department leaders, will presumably be tasked with picking up the pieces and making the best of what looks to be a bad job early in the season.

This season is already effectively done for. Unless there's some miraculous progress made with the car, Williams is on course to finish last in the constructors' championship for a second consecutive year. Were there to be a shock turnaround, it would at least partially validate Lowe's changes, which means the team presumably is confident that its course is set.

The question is, what now? There's no obvious person to bring in as Lowe's successor in terms of those with experience of the role. As McLaren found when it was seeking a new technical director, there aren't a vast number of candidates out there, and when you are struggling you don't exactly have the chance to take your pick.

Just what the thinking of the team's leadership is in this case remains to be seen, but it seems from the outside like a shift in approach is needed. Williams surely can't afford to make another costly signing, which means either restructure what you've got and make the best of it, or identify another, lower-profile figure from another team who might be interested in moving to what is currently F1's worst team to make a name for themselves.

Choose the right candidate, and fresh ideas, new thinking and real motivation could be the reward. Get it wrong, and the consequences could be dire.

But it's not just about one individual. Williams Grand Prix Engineering, as it was called when started in 1977, was built upon the tenacity of Frank Williams and the technical genius of Patrick Head. Today, you can't make an F1 team work with just a single technical visionary, it's a collaborative process, change is slow and decisions made today might not bear fruit until a year or two, perhaps more, down the line.

F1 teams are vast edifices and while Williams does employ some very accomplished personnel and should have the structures and working practices to do well, clearly something is wrong.

While Lowe clearly did not achieve what he set out to do, simply getting rid of him doesn't solve any problems

Of all the technical leaders it's had, it would perhaps be logical to now look to a new technical director with more of an aerodynamic background given that's the key chassis performance differentiator in F1. Trouble is, Claire Williams can't exactly get on the phone to lure James Allison in from Mercedes - although it should be noted that McKiernan does have an aero background. But whoever the candidate and whatever the CV, it's essential they have the management skills to do the job.

It's also necessary for Williams to find its place in the world. While its famous name means intuitively it feels like the team should be at the front, in the modern era it is actually a small squad. Williams continues to be a staunch defender of the need for teams to remain as bona fide constructors in their own right, a position Claire Williams reiterated at Barcelona.

But it is resources that define your performance potential and there's no reason to expect Williams to get anywhere near the factory teams or Red Bull. And with Racing Point, Haas and Alfa Romeo all benefiting from close ties to big teams, is it time for Williams to bite the bullet and go down that route?

Possibly, but it should be wary of all such a cure-all scenario. Becoming an affiliated team would not be a panacea, and it would also be costly to a business in terms of jobs, and lead to question marks over the cost of sustaining the facilities that it does have. It would also be effectively admitting defeat.

It's easy to criticise Williams, but today it's in an invidious position. Most teams have a major shareholder - be it an automotive manufacturer, wealthy individuals or the Bahraini sovereign wealth fund - to inject cash, but Williams does not. It has to stand on its own two feet and is dependent on sponsorship. Its plight also partly reflects that F1's inequitable distribution of funds is squeezing the true independents.

What Williams looks like in the future is more than just a question of who the technical leader will be. Blood-letting and scapegoating is good for headlines and can be superficially satisfying. But while Lowe clearly did not achieve what he set out to do, simply getting rid of him doesn't solve any problems. The struggles of Williams stretch back a long way.

But Williams does now have an opportunity. For an independent operation to thrive in F1 requires some lateral thinking, so perhaps it's time for Williams to get creative. How it replaces Lowe is the first test of that. It won't be easy, the answers aren't obvious, but things never are that straightforward in F1.

What it can't do is to keep doing the same thing with different names and expect a different result.