Claire Williams has addressed the rumours regarding the alleged reasons behind the late arrival of their 2019 car, the FW42.
So far, the Williams team have refused to disclose the reasons behind the late arrival of their 2019 car, which was only rolled out part-way through test one.
The lack of reasoning was met with rumours regarding the financial situation at Williams and reports that the future of technical boss Paddy Lowe was under threat.
Speaking to the media on the second day of the second pre-season test, deputy team principal Claire Williams maintained her position of not wishing to delve into the finer details of what went wrong.
However, she addressed a couple of the rumours which had circulated during pre-season testing.
“I still can’t give you a full breakdown [of what went wrong],” said Williams.
“I do stand by last week, I wouldn’t necessarily want to either because I don’t think that it’s right to great, glorious detail about what happened.
“I think there were many stories around what could’ve been the cause of it. A couple that I read were that there were issues with external suppliers, which wasn’t the case, or that financially we were in a difficult position and that had had an effect on car build, and it didn’t.”
She added that Williams’ mission was to recover the time lost and work on extracting the most out of their condensed running.
“As I’ve said – and I know a couple of teams have come out in support of what happened to us – I think we take for granted sometimes that we’re going to get one car to the test track and two cars to a race track, but Williams still designs and build race cars in-house in their entirety.
“There are 22-odd thousand parts to a car which we have to design, we have to manufacture, which we have to assemble, which we have to put through crash testing etc. and that’s an enormous job, and we just didn’t make it for a number of reasons.
“I think we’ve seen historically that it can happen and we need to just make absolutely sure that the situation doesn’t happen again.”
“There hasn’t been any time [for a debrief], we just making sure that all our efforts are focused on making sure that we get the programme covered that we need to here.”
Both George Russell and Robert Kubica have completed over 100 laps on their respective days in the car, with both drivers having one more full day in the FW42 remaining.
