Williams Confident of Solving Problems

Williams chiefs are optimistic that they can turn their disappointing FW27 into a front runner by the start of the European season after saying on Tuesday that wind tunnel problems had left the FW27 three quarters of a second behind the opposition.

Following the pre-season testing programme, and comments from Mark Webber on Monday that time was running out to get the car on the pace by the first race of the season, Williams co-owners Patrick Head and Frank Williams have admitted that the start of the campaign will be a struggle, but that the situation should be turned around within a matter of weeks.

Head, who stood down from his role as technical director in the middle of last season, revealed that the team had been left on the back foot because of problems with the new, state of the art wind tunnel at their Grove factory to replace their existing tunnel. The new facility has produced figures from its models that have not translated onto the track, and the team have spent the last few weeks trying to recover the lost ground.

Speaking to journalists, Head made it clear that he was confident the car was basically sound, but admitted the focus needed to be put onto its aerodynamics. He said: "We are not expecting to be the class of the field at the start of the season, but the car is good and has great potential to develop. This will happen early in the season, and we will get stronger over the early races.

"The new wind tunnel is a fantastic piece of kit, but we were probably a bit over-confident. Our first wind tunnel runs fifty percent models; the new one runs sixty percent models, and we've had trouble with the correlation between the two tunnels. With the benefit of hindsight we should have waited a year before running the different tunnels with different models."

Williams were first alerted to the problems with their new wind tunnel on the eve of its new car launch in January when they ran the full-sized FW27 in the tunnel for the first time and it did not produce the high levels of downforce that had been expected from data produced using the sixty percent models.

But despite further problems, and the fact that the team believe they go into the year behind Ferrari, McLaren and Renault, both Head and Williams are confident that they can rescue the situation.

Head said: "My ability to predict the future is no better than anyone else's, and maybe it is misplaced, but I am confident that we can make a lot of progress over the next month to six weeks by bringing additional performance to the car."

Team boss Frank Williams added: "It's deeply embarrassing. We've got to make a rapid recovery over the next few months. But we will be applying performance at a better rate than we have ever done before."

Williams said it will be difficult to imagine starting the season "from the first two rows of the grid", but made it clear that pre-season testing times were always difficult to judge and that a clearer picture of the team's overall competitiveness will probably only come at the Malaysian Grand Prix, because the Sepang track is more aerodynamically demanding than Melbourne.