Williams: 2019 F1 car delay not from budget or supply problems

While the team is conducting a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of why the FW42 missed the opening two days of pre-season testing, deputy team principal Claire Williams has dismissed two theories.

"There were many stories around about what potentially could have been the cause of it," she said.

"A couple that I read [said] that there were issues with external suppliers. That wasn't the case.

"Or that financially we were in a difficult position and that had an impact on car build. It didn't."

While she did not elaborate further on what were the real causes of the delay, Williams said that the effort required to create an F1 car from scratch should never be underestimated.

"We sometimes take for granted that we're going to get one car to the test track and two cars to the race track," she said.

"But Williams still builds, or designs and builds, its race cars in-house, in their entirety.

"There are 22-odd-thousand parts to a car, which we have to design, which we have to manufacture, which we have to assemble, which we have to put through crash testing, and that's an enormous job.

"We just didn't make it for a number of reasons. It can happen - we've seen that historically - and we need to just make absolutely sure that the situation doesn't happen again."

Williams also explained that it was important the investigation into what went wrong exposed all the factors that contributed to the problem, to ensure that the team does not risk being late with its car again.

"There has been some work started, but it will probably take a few weeks to fully compile that, and we have to get it right because if we don't, then we're not going to get next year's programme right," she said.

"We've got to take our time and make sure we cover every base off, and get it right for next year."

While Williams has made up for lost time with some decent mileage in the second test, the team does not appear to have so far made any major competitive gains.

Williams said it was too early to suggest the team was slowest overall, but made clear that it was not expecting any dramatic change from how it ended last year.

"Clearly we don't want to be at the back again, but I have always said, and I said last week, this is a journey, a pathway, and other teams have done an exceptional job to maybe make better inroads than we have," she said.

"But we'll keep working hard to make sure that we recover from where we were last year, and from where we currently may be in testing."