Disappointing weekend for Williams

It was apparent from Thursday that Williams were going to struggle this weekend with the team struggling to get the tyres to work around the tight streets of Monaco.

With both drivers starting outside the top ten, it was going to be difficult for the team to get points, even though the team thought their race pace would have been better once they got heat into the tyres, but that really didn’t transpire, with both finishing down the order.

Commenting on the race, Rob Smedley William’s Head of Performance Engineering said, “It was quite a difficult weekend and we were nowhere near where we should be. At Monaco, if qualifying doesn’t go well you have partly made your bed so we knew getting points was going to be tough.

“It wasn’t a great race for us but we can’t dwell too much as we are out of position. We have to look at all areas to see what went wrong here with the inherent car performance and set-up.

Turning to next year, “We cannot return here in 2016 and repeat this performance. We now have to focus firmly on the next three races.

“We have a really good package and some healthy upgrades coming soon so we look forward to coming back stronger in Canada.”

Valtteri Bottas who was the higher of the two drivers in the race, even with his bad qualifying, “This has been a tough weekend that ended in an even tougher race. We tried everything to try and get some points but with the pace we had it wasn’t possible today.

“We tried the two-stop strategy which never really came to us, with the safety car coming at just the wrong time. There are not too many positives from the weekend but plenty we can learn from as to why we struggled.

“We know we still have a good car and go to races in the next few weeks where we should be able to demonstrate our true performance.”

Felipe Massa lost his race in the first corner, losing his front wing in the process which put him at the back of the field, “Today was a very frustrating day and a race to forget for us. My race was effectively over in Turn 1, with another car pushing me over and I was left with a lot of damage to my tyre and front wing.

“The pitstop I had to make on Lap 1 put me right at the back of the pack and I spent the rest of the race looking out for blue flags.

“The car has not had its usual performance all weekend but we know that we are heading to tracks in Canada and Austria that suit our car and we should be back fighting towards the front.”

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