Why Williams is dreading the British GP

It's impossible not to associate the British Grand Prix with Williams, given the success the team has enjoyed at the race over the decades. And it's not just about the distant past and the glory days of Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill.

Just three years ago, Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas qualified third and fourth at Silverstone and, having jumped ahead of the works Mercedes duo, they initially ran at the front of the field. It was an extraordinary sight.

Since then the team's fortunes have taken a dive, and this year's FW41 has consistently been the slowest car on the Formula 1 grid. The team's only points so far came with Lance Stroll's eighth place in a high-attrition race in Baku, and Williams is last in the constructors' championship - 12 points behind Sauber.

Just avoiding qualifying on the back row this weekend would be an achievement for Stroll and team-mate Sergey Sirotkin.

"I love Silverstone and I love going there," says deputy team principal Claire Williams. "But I'm dreading it because we're going to let our fans down, and that's excruciatingly painful. Silverstone is going to show up our weaknesses and our failures even more because of the type of circuit it is.

"So I am dreading it, I'm dreading it for everybody. But we have to go through the pain to get out the other side."

Williams was flattered in the early days of the hybrid F1 era by the superior performance and reliability of the Mercedes power unit. That advantage has long gone, but the team has still dropped way behind fellow Mercedes customer Force India.

So, what's gone wrong at Grove over the past couple of seasons? It's a hugely complex question, and one that the team has been struggling to address. The real challenge is to understand why this year's car was born so uncompetitive when all the numbers suggested it should work. If a team can't get to the bottom of that conundrum, there's no reason to expect its next car will be any better.

"The only way to get out of this is to go through it slowly and methodically, and to leave no stone unturned," says Williams. "It's not just throwing things in there and hoping for the best.

"First off when you've got an issue you've got to analyse exactly what it is, and then put a fix in place. During that process inevitably you'll find other fires that you've got to put out along the way.

"I'm dreading Silverstone because we're going to let our fans down, and that's excruciatingly painful" Claire Williams

"And it is tough, because it's not just one problem that we have. Clearly, with aerodynamics we've lost our way on this year's car, but there are lots of other processes that are going wrong as well.

"It's a really difficult piece of work, getting an F1 team into the shape that you need it to be in in order to be successful. People can underestimate that. When you do have problems, people have an expectation that it's a relatively quick fix, and unfortunately with the problems that we have at the moment there's not a quick fix. It's going to take us a while to get ourselves out of this."

For technical chief Paddy Lowe, the process of turning Williams's form around starts with the matter of addressing its basic principles.

"You have to go right back into the heart of what you're doing," says Lowe, the man with the ultimate responsibility for sorting Williams's struggles out, "and [go] down to some core science of how you're generating performance, and deal with it.

"That's why unfortunately some of the things that we're dealing with are taking longer to come out to the track than any of us would perhaps like.

"We sit here week on week and aren't satisfied with our performance. But we're working behind the scenes on things that we hope will chip away at the problem and get us into a better place."

It's a new situation for Lowe. Apart from the first half of 2009 at McLaren, he's always been associated with success, or at least with a car that was capable of challenging for race wins. He arrived at Mercedes just as the pieces fell into place - although he'd be the first to admit that Ross Brawn had done the hard part. His timing at Williams was rather less fortunate.

"F1 is a very complicated business, certainly the engineering side," he says. "So it's taken time, frankly, to really drill in and find the areas that needed the most attention and what kind of attention they needed.

"If I'd known all the answers to all the things that I know now on day one, things would be a lot easier, but it's the same in any job. And I'll know more next week than I know this week. It's just how it is - a step-by-step process."

It's just as hard for those who've been at Williams through the recent good times, and who now must contribute to the process of finding out what's gone wrong. There's nowhere to hide.

"It's difficult, there's no doubt about it," says head of vehicle performance Rob Smedley. "It's certainly one of the most difficult situations that most of us have ever been in in F1, to see a team like Williams struggling like this.

"It's about now putting together objective data and doing things calmly and rationally, but with as much speed as we possibly can to sort the situation out.

"You've got to man-up, there's no point in shying away from it, we have to take responsibility for the project, that the project has not gone as we would have wanted it to. And then we move forward as a group.

"You can't go around looking for silver bullets, there's never one silver bullet. There'll be a lot of things wrong with this car. We're fathoming them out as we're going along. I think we're doing a reasonably sound engineering process to try to understand what's gone wrong."

"You've got to man-up, there's no point in shying away from it, we have to take responsibility for the project" Rob Smedley

That, again, means going back to basics.

"Before you can fix any problem you've got to understand where the source is," Smedley continues. "Running at it and having a different idea every week is not going to help us in the end, is not going to sort out the fundamental problems we've got. And it's clear we've got fundamental problems with the car."

In the end, success in F1 always comes down to people and getting the best out of them. The recent departures of Williams's chief designer Ed Wood and aero head Dirk de Beer led to some internal changes. If the team has already targeted key outsiders to bolster the technical group, gardening leave will mean they won't be arriving for a while.

"Yes, two people have gone, for reasons that we don't go into, but we do have a strong team in place," says Williams. "But that team may need some more shuffling, and it may need some more augmenting, and that's the process we're going through at the moment. Unfortunately in F1 people are on long contracts, and that causes problems in itself."

For now, it's a question of making the most of those who are already on board and ensuring that everyone is working in the right direction.

"That's the process we're going through now," says Smedley. "We're going to make sure we've got all the right people in all the right places, and they're working coherently, so there's no walls, or silos of performance or information.

"It's about getting good cross-functional communication, getting projects up and running that are again cross-functional between the design group and the simulation group, or the simulation group and the aerodynamics group, and ensuring the whole thing is working as fluidly and as coherently as possible.

"In this sport there's never one person that changes everything. That's kind of the outside perception of what F1 is about, but it's not. It's about groups of people. Any one person can't make that difference, but a group of people can."

Turning a team around is a complicated process. The immediate priority might be getting the next new endplate or bargeboard onto the car, especially with races coming thick and fast. But doing that during an intense period of soul-searching and reorganisation is not easy, although those tasks can be worked on in parallel.

"I see those as one and the same, actually," says Lowe. "So that's why the things we do to fix this car are all about improving our processes and validating our way of working. That's why it automatically carries to what we do for next year's car."

Preparing for 2019, and the fairly serious package of aero changes, is another challenge.

Preparing for 2019, and the fairly serious package of aero changes, is another challenge for Williams

"It's almost inevitable that having a car that's where our 2018 car is, there will be some ongoing ramification into the '19 car," says Smedley. "And it's our job as the senior technical team to think about where the strategy is for minimising that, so we can end up with at least a brighter future for 2019."

Did last weekend's Austrian Grand Prix represent the first signs of a change of fortunes? Fifteenth fastest for Stroll in Q2 might not look like much on paper, but the context was significant.

New parts and the work the team did over the weekend gave all concerned some confidence that they now have a handle on the instability issues that have plagued the car this season.

"It was one of our worst tracks last year," Lowe notes. "And many of the problems that we're seeing with this year's car are actually exaggerations of the problems we had last year.

"So we didn't come here with any great optimism, and to see where we've improved, with some of the things we've done, is encouraging.

"A small step in a good direction, but we're not going to rely on that in isolation as an indicator, although we think we've solved some of the problems we need to solve."

That optimism was tempered somewhat by another disappointing race, but with more updates coming for Silverstone and Hockenheim, there could be light at the end of the Grove windtunnel.

The future is where the focus must lie. Inevitably Silverstone will conjure up memories of glorious July days, of Clay Regazzoni, Mansell and Hill. The trick is to not allow that history to be a burden.

"You can't keep looking backwards," says Smedley, "either to the immediate past, or to the legacy past. I'm a great believer that your past results are meaningless in F1, and they can be the results of last week - it doesn't matter.

"It's about looking forward, it's about making sure we're identifying weak areas, both within the structure of the company and within the car technically, and then plugging it. But it will take time."