Williams not writing off season

Frank Williams has ruled out any suggestion of his team writing off this season so they can focus their efforts entirely on 2009 instead

Although Williams have suffered a disappointing dip in their performance recently after a strong start to the campaign, the Grove-based outfit are to maintain an even balance between work on this year's car and next year's.

This approach is in stark contract to their nearest championship rivals Honda Racing, who made a decision early in the year to focus as much of their efforts onto the 2009 machine as they could.

Speaking about the split of resources, Williams said: "We are here to race every race, not half a year. We are running two separate programmes - one (on the current car) with far more resources presently than the other."

Williams revealed that the team's ability to keep working on their 2008 machine was helped by the fact that they began work on next year's challenger very early.

"We started the mechanical design of next year's car quite a while ago , and we started the aero work with a small group last October/November," he said.

"Right now, as has always been the case, we have more people on the racing car presently racing than the new car because we started early. So the pressure isn't on to put a massive effort onto that (2009) car."