Williams's driver call exposes its flagging revival

Williams says it does not compete in Formula 1 merely to make up the numbers. Of course, there is little point participating in professional sport if you are not 'in it to win it', as they say, but although Williams has not won a world championship for 20 years, been an F1 title contender since 2003, or won a race in the last five seasons, we are repeatedly told this team is on a proper mission to get back to the top of the series it once dominated.

"One of the things Williams has been good at doing in the past few years is very quickly identifying its errors and weaknesses, and then resolving those, not letting the grass grow under our feet," Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams told Autosport last winter.

"You don't change your team's fortunes unless you actually affect changes. You can't hope the aero guys are going to suddenly come up with something amazing. And a Formula 1 team isn't just about aero - you have to have the whole package working to perfection if you want to be successful."

The signings of Paddy Lowe (as chief technical officer) and Dirk de Beer (as head of aero) ahead of the 2017 season were all part of the next phase of Williams's grand plan to get back to the front of the grid, following previous smart investments in F1's class-leading Mercedes engine and development of a department dedicated to understanding the black art of Pirelli tyres.

But the Williams revival seems to be steadily unravelling. Having finished third in the constructors' championship in 2014, with nine podium finishes, Williams's results have steadily declined to the point where podiums are now a hostage to fortune rather than a regular occurrence.

Instead of building on that competitive foundation, Williams is now not even the best Mercedes customer team, let alone a threat to the frontrunners.

Of course, it was always going to take time for changes to the team's technical structure to filter through to the car and potentially arrest this worrying mini-slump.

But even if the 2018 Williams is a stronger car than the decent FW40, and develops better than its predecessor too, a good car is nothing without the drivers to do it justice, and this is where Williams now looks much weaker compared to the recent past.

Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin are undoubtedly decent young drivers - each boasting respectable records in junior single-seaters. But they do not look like the pairing needed to lead Williams back to the promised land.

The second retirement of Felipe Massa, followed by the failure (so far) of Robert Kubica's heroic comeback from devastating injury, has opened the way for Russian rookie Sirotkin to finally get his shot at the big time.

Sirotkin hasn't got this seat purely by default. Renault says he is fast and technically intelligent, and it seems he did a more impressive job than Kubica when both tested the FW40 in Abu Dhabi at the end of November.

Sirotkin deserves recognition for that. But Kubica is clearly not the driver he once was, or the one Williams hoped he could become again, and it seems there are at least 15 million other reasons why Sirotkin has now taken the final vacant seat on the 2018 F1 grid.

Williams now looks very much like a paying-driver team again. Stroll and Sirotkin are both talented, and there is no reason why they cannot carve out decent careers for themselves, but it is also patently obvious they are not where they are now based solely on their driving abilities.

Continuing with Massa was arguably Williams's best choice based on his surprisingly strong performances in 2017. He gelled well with the latest generation of faster cars, which were more in tune with the mid-2000s machines in which he first made his name and became a title contender. Massa regularly got Williams into Q3, while Stroll struggled to escape Q1, and Massa would have scored many more points but for a bit of bad luck and some poor reliability.

Lowe described Massa as "a real pleasure to work with" and "completely dependable" in the car. "He's always going to go out there and get a great job done and find a great reference in the car," added the Williams technical chief when asked for an assessment of Massa's contribution last season. "And with Lance on the other side, it's always important to have a reference.

"There are a lot of drivers out there who have bad days and then you don't know where you are; in our case, we need that reference, we'd have been a bit lost, so it's been great for the team and a great support to Lance - by being so consistent and constant, and also literally helping Lance.

"He's given him quite a lot of coaching, a lot of important advice around techniques for different things, whether it's warming tyres or tactics or whatever."

Stroll and Williams will no longer be able to count on that important reference, and the implication is that Williams could now become "a bit lost" again. Such a glowing reference for Massa's skillset suggested Lowe thinks it a shame that Williams is not retaining Massa's services.

"These decisions are always difficult, but we've been over that ground before and a decision was reached" was Lowe's euphemistic response to that line of questioning.

A Sirotkin/Stroll pairing looks awfully familiar to how Williams went from having Nico Hulkenberg alongside Rubens Barrichello, to eventually ditching both in favour of Bruno Senna and Pastor Maldonado

Massa made it clear he wasn't prepared to pay his way to remain on the grid in 2018. When you've won 11 grands prix, been on the podium 41 times, and almost beaten Lewis Hamilton to a world championship (albeit nine years ago) that's an understandable position to take.

Pascal Wehrlein and Daniil Kvyat emerged as strong alternative candidates for the seat at one stage, but both depended on patronage from junior driver schemes rather than bags of self-sourced cash to go racing. Neither can boast Massa's experience or track record, but both have proven themselves fast, and have enough recent F1 experience to provide a decent reference.

Wehrlein drove well enough in 2017 to deserve another shot. Now Ferrari and Charles Leclerc have muscled in on Sauber, Wehrlein must bide his time and wait for another chance. Kvyat has endured a rough time lately, but made it to F1 on merit with Red Bull and now has a chance to show Ferrari what he can do.

But driving ability is no longer enough in itself for Williams it seems. Reserve Paul di Resta, whom Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff felt did an "unbelievable job" subbing for an unwell Massa at the last second in Hungary last year, was also an outside bet to take the drive at one point. He would probably still be racing in F1 regardless if driver-sourced money didn't talk so loudly these days.

The Kubica comeback bandwagon, as wonderful as it would have been for Formula 1, always looked as though it was running a little out of control, and even the once great Pole was required to find funding to make his return should it have happened. In the end, it seems giving him a race seat was not worth the financial loss to Williams, or the deficit in pace.

Perhaps that could change if Kubica gets more seat time, and retaining him in another capacity allows Williams to harness his skills as a technical reference, motivator and advisor in the meantime. It's a smart move, but it won't change the here-and-now challenge of scoring vital points during a potentially challenging season.

Sirotkin is the last best option, because he was quicker than a rusty Kubica and crucially his sponsors will help make up the financial shortfall left by Williams's recent underachievement in the championship, falling revenue to all teams resulting from Liberty Media's recent takeover of F1, plus the absence of a £10million one-off payment from Mercedes last winter, made in exchange for Williams releasing star driver Valtteri Bottas from his contract.

Bottas has a central role in all this. He was originally promoted to a Williams race seat in 2013 on the basis of the team's last failed experiment balancing budgets through its driver line-up.

Williams has migrated from pairing Bottas's homegrown young talent alongside Massa's grizzled winning experience on merit in 2014, to placing faith in a pair of unproven monied youngsters in Stroll and Sirotkin four years later.

This looks awfully familiar to how Williams operated in its pre-revival days circa 2010-13, when it went from having Nico Hulkenberg (the most exciting young talent of his era) alongside multiple grand prix winner Rubens Barrichello, to eventually ditching both in favour of Bruno Senna and Pastor Maldonado.

Senna and Maldonado both boasted success in GP2; each was capable of impressive feats on their given days, but they also brought a handy cash injection with them. Williams thought it could have its cake and eat it, but ended up subsequently promoting Bottas because of the ultimate financial cost of losing so many championship points to missed opportunities on the track.

The financial realities of competing in Formula 1 are not going to change any time soon. All teams outside the big five of Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Renault are going to need to fight for their survival. What was recently a realistic chance to battle for third or fourth in the constructors' championship on merit is about to become a scrap for sixth at best, which means another hefty hit on revenue, made worse if you can't bring home the best results possible.

Super-quick, reliable drivers are worth their weight in gold in this regard. Force India has always recognised this, and is now reaping the benefits of putting itself in the virtuous circle that results from that focus. Sergio Perez's personal sponsors are a handy bonus, of course, but he has also earned a reputation as one of the most capable operators in F1's midfield. Perez was the ideal Williams target, but the team couldn't lure him and his money away. Force India pairing him with Mercedes junior Esteban Ocon makes for one of the strongest line-ups in F1's midfield.

Potential is important, but by its nature doesn't get the job done. Stroll did a handful of impressive things in his rookie F1 season, but he remains unreliable, with a lot to prove at this level. Sirotkin has won a few races in GP2, and was faster than Kubica in testing, but is otherwise a complete unknown for Williams, and a total gamble. Neither is likely to be the immediately reliable reference Williams really needs at this critical stage of its flagging revival.

Williams will be better off financially in the short term for this decision no doubt, but that will be scant consolation if a difficult period in the team's recent history is about to repeat itself.

Everyone has a business to run in Formula 1, but it's tough to do more than merely make up the numbers if all you're doing each year is simply making the numbers add up.