Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads

Winter testing suggested that Williams would be in pretty good shape in 2008, and possibly leading the group challenging inevitable pacesetters Ferrari and McLaren.

Indeed, the season got off to a great start in Melbourne, where Nico Rosberg took his first podium finish with third, and Kazuki Nakajima backed him up with seventh, after an eventful afternoon. The team left Oz with nine points to their name, behind only McLaren, for whom Lewis Hamilton had scored 10.

Since then, not a great deal has gone right for the team. They've slipped to seventh in the constructors' table, and are only two points clear of Honda. Having said that, Williams are also only 11 points off fourth-placed Toyota, indicating how close things are in the midfield, and just how valuable the recent run of podiums has been for Red Bull, Toyota, Honda and Renault.

Since Australia, Williams have scored just seven points and have not bettered seventh place. Rosberg has scored just twice, with a pair of eighths his only decent results. There's no question that team and driver have performed far below their potential.

"It's not good enough really," says technical director Sam Michael. "We should really be in fourth place in the championship, that was our target this year. We've not achieved that. We've underperformed on a couple of tracks."

Last time out at Hockenheim, Rosberg finished 10th. There were no points but he wasn't far off on a day of low attrition, and he was sandwiched at the flag by Jarno Trulli and Fernando Alonso, two regular top eight men. It was not a stellar result, but was at least a useful confidence boost after a terrible recent run for the German. Monaco, Montreal, Magny-Cours and Silverstone featured an unfortunate series of incidents and mishaps and some serious points gathering opportunities went awry.

It started to go wrong in Monaco. Nico looked committed and awesomely fast out on the track in practice, and that translated into sixth on the grid. But he was in trouble from the off and after dropping to the back for a change of nose, he was never in the hunt for points. He eventually had a huge accident at the entry to the Swimming Pool in the closing laps.

At Montreal he qualified fifth on the difficult surface, but then somehow managed to get caught up in the Hamilton pitlane accident. He survived it, but once again needed a new nose, and dropped out of contention as far as scoring points is concerned. Had he stopped a metre or two short of the traffic jam, he would surely have finished at least third.

Nico Rosberg pits after colliding in the pitlane © LAT

"It's not something we've spoken about publicly," says Michael of the incident. "It's something we dealt with as a team and I prefer to leave it that way. There were a lot of things that went on there. We could have done a better job for him as well, to help him understand what was in front of him. That's racing, we've learned from that as a team and we've put things in place to help our drivers again in the future, because we weren't perfect. We want to give them every opportunity for that not to happen."

To start fifth and sixth in a pair of races where there was attrition ahead, and to come away with no points, was nothing short of a disaster for Nico.

"'One of the worst things about the constructors' championship is that we didn't capitalise on that," rues Michael. "We came away from two races where, before Safety Cars, or rain, or anything, we had a car that could have finished on the podium in both grands prix. Well, probably not Montreal in terms of outright pace, but we were definitely good enough for top four in a straight race. We came away with two points [for Nakajima's seventh in Monaco], when we should have come away with at least 10."

Even worse for Rosberg, after Montreal he picked up a 10-place grid penalty for France, a decision that was particularly frustrating for Williams.

"'I think the biggest shame was that we didn't actually get a penalty on the day. Lewis was out, but we were still running. If they'd given him a drive-through or a stop-go, at least he would have taken that pain in Montreal.

'The penalty was causing a collision, I think. Maybe I'm being a bit pedantic, but he didn't cause a collision. The penalty should maybe have been reversing in the pit lane. That was inevitable anyway, and the FIA would have applied that at some point. Anyway, the end result is he got a penalty and we agreed with the FIA. If someone else did that, we'd expect them to get penalised as well.

"Magny-Cours is one of those tracks where if you don't qualify well, you're probably going to race badly. It's almost like Monte Carlo in that respect, it's extremely difficult to overtake and we went there with Nico having the 10-place penalty, so it was always going to be pretty tough to overcome that. Even if you've got a fast car, as we've seen plenty of times in the past there, it's very difficult to overtake on that track. You could see that this year with McLaren."

The team did their best to help Nico overcome the penalty by opting for a set-up that would in theory allow him to be quick on the straight and overtake at the hairpin. In the event, he couldn't better 15th in qualifying and thus started at the back.

"We were aware that the only place you can really overtake is under braking into Turn Four,"says Patrick Head. "So it was either run lots of wing and be quicker round T3, but be slow coming up to T4, or run less wing. We made the wrong decision and ran less wing, so we were quicker up to Turn Four, but we would have been far better off, and quicker round the track, if we'd run more wing."

Nico struggled round to a disappointing 16th place in the race. At Silverstone, he was free of the penalty, but the car proved uncompetitive and was again shown up by fast corners. To make matters worse, Nico had a suspension problem in qualifying. It could only be properly rectified by changing parts, which earned him a pit lane start.

Nico Rosberg runs behind the Force India of Adrian Sutil and the Honda of Rubens Barrichello during the French Grand Prix © LAT

"We obviously started on the back foot with a technical problem for Nico in qualifying," says Head. "We probably wouldn't have gone through to Q3 anyway, we would have been mid to high Q2 material, but it would have been a position he could have raced from. As it was, we imposed a technical problem on ourselves.

"It was a hydraulic problem in the suspension. We changed the specification of the car, we didn't just replace a component. We took some components off the car that we weren't happy with. But even starting from the pit lane, had he not run into the back of Glock, he would certainly have been fourth. And maybe he would have challenged Rubens."

Like Monaco and Magny-Cours, Silverstone was a race where points got away. From his pitlane start, Rosberg did a great job in the awful conditions and the team made perfect calls on tyres. He was one of the few to go onto extreme wets at the same time as Barrichello.

"We weren't able to get by Fisichella," says Head, "which meant that we were very slow in the first part of the race, and when we did get clear the heavier rain started coming. We made a good decision to put the car on full wets. We did the first stop onto a second set of inters and what would have been the final pitstop was on to full wets, which was also the way for Kazuki. But then Nico had to make an additional stop for a new front end.

"Where he ran into the back of Glock, the previous lap Glock had stayed wide to be on the wet line to keep his wet tyres in shape, so Nico went on the inside line, and went into the corner probably a lot faster. He was eight seconds a lap quicker or something! And Glock moved in, which he had every right to do, to defend his position, but I think Nico was so much faster when Glock moved in that he couldn't slow down."

The only upside was another solid run into the points from Nakajima, who finished eighth: "He had a few spins, lost 15 or 20 seconds in various offs, and lost more time having to wait behind Nico at the second pit stop, yet finished only a fraction off Trulli and Alonso. Again it was an opportunity to do better, but he qualified 15th, so if you qualify 15th you've got to be happy about finishing eighth."

Rosberg may have had an eventful time in recent races, but the team has not held that against him, at least in public.

"In Monaco, Montreal and Silverstone he's lost potentially very good points for his own championship position, and for the team's," says Head. "But, ultimately, it's up to us to get on with making the car quicker. I'm sure he didn't want to have those bumps and I'm sure he'll go away and think about how he can avoid that in future. At the end of the day it's not for us to rant at him - everybody's got me down as a ranter, but in fact I'm not. At the end of the day, Nico will go away and sort it out."

"I think he's driven really well in terms of pace," says Michael. "Most of the time the driver is limited by where the car is. When the car is good we've seen he can drive fast, and that's what we want out of a driver. Everything can always be better, but it's not too bad at the moment.

Sam Michael © XPB

"Most of the time when the car is fast, Nico delivers. I've never ever been on the blaming drivers campaign, that's not my thing. I would rather concentrate on making the car better. I like Nico and he's got a good approach. He's very professional, I know he takes things very seriously, and I see results in him when he improves. That's what matters to me, I like working with drivers like that."

Now the team is looking ahead to Hungary. It's obvious that the car prefers slower corners, so there is a reasonable chance that Rosberg will be back in the top ten. But as others move ahead, it's not getting any easier.

"I think it's clear that we've got to improve the car," Head admits. "I'm pretty certain we're capable of doing it. France and Silverstone had one or two faster corners and we seem to be weaker there. And Red Bull and Renault have made genuine improvements to their cars."

"Malaysia and Magny-Cours were places where we really underperformed," says Michael. "Malaysia not so much in the race, but qualifying set us back. Both of them have similar characteristics in terms of getting grip, particularly on the first lap. Malaysia much more than Magny-Cours. Definitely, on those types of tracks, we're not strong enough at the moment. But if you look at Monaco and Montreal, we were quicker than all those other teams.

"It's so tight in the midfield. There are only a few points that cover four or five teams, so you can move up and down the order."

Hungary aside, the two upcoming new races in Valencia and Singapore are obviously of interest to the team, and a bit of rain at Spa, Fuji, Shanghai or Interlagos might allow Williams to make amends for the races where things went wrong.

The big question is whether there's any real chance of closing the gap to rest on pure performance. Like everyone else, Williams has had to address the difficult question of how much resource to devote towards the 2009 car. Despite a lack of manufacturer support, the team is taking a bold approach to the new era of KERS.

"We're certainly focussing a lot on 2009," explains Head, "which we've had to do in order to be ready for it. But we'll still have the odd window where we'll be looking at this car. If we come up with ideas that might improve it, then we'll be using a window in the wind tunnel. We can swap from one model to another pretty quickly."

Nico Rosberg tests slick tires at Jerez © LAT

Michael agrees that the future has to be the main focus: "Looking forward, our target is to keep improving this car, although most of our programme is concentrating on 2009 now. Everyone faces the same problem, and were facing that decision five or six months ago, how much to invest in this car. The mechanical side is not too bad, because if you come up with new geometry, suspension, or brakes, it might carry over into 2009. But the aero stuff is all going to go in the bin, so that's the hardest compromise.

"In normal years, even if you have a reasonable rule change, some of the things like wing profiles or brake ducts can carry over. Maybe not in its exact form, but they'll be some type of carry over. You don't have that this time, so it's been very difficult to judge that.

"Next year is so different, there is so much work to put into it that if you don't put it all into it soon, you'll really suffer next year. Now there are tiny differences between the cars, because they're so refined, which is why you've got these close grids. Next year the differences will be pretty significant I think, because you've got such a big rule change, and everyone will be at a different level to start with."