Williams F1 team makes breakthrough on low-speed circuits

Valtteri Bottas finished fifth while Felipe Massa was on course for points before picking up a puncture from a collision with Force India's Nico Hulkenberg and later retiring with a gearbox problem.

Williams has suffered a tendency to understeer heavily at low speed and as a result it struggled in Monaco and Hungary earlier this season.

But Smedley said that having worked hard since Monaco to find solutions, the team has recently arrived at conclusions of that work.

"We have made great inroads over this last period of time in terms of dragging pace out of it around a circuit like this," said Smedley.

"We have done a great deal of work on that, it's been constant since Monaco, on that.

"Getting the car to work in certain conditions was a bit of a problem for us.

"We were really just in the last weeks arriving at the conclusions of that work and how we could make it better.

"We found we could make some of it better with the car set-up itself like we have done this weekend while some of it will have to come from the drawing board or the science textbooks.

"Certainly, we have done a really good job in getting the car working round here.

"It's not perfect, but we have made a good step forward.

"Going back to Hungary, even with the same car, on basis of this weekend you can see we would have done a lot better on that type of circuit."

Bottas agreed that Williams has made some progress with the weaknesses of the car.

"We know better how to operate the car on these type of tracks and how you approach the set-up of the car," he said.

"We've made progress but we haven't definitely sorted it out because we saw how close we were to the Ferrari in Monza and on this type of track they are so far ahead.

"I'm sure there's still plenty of things we can do better."