F1 Talking point: What’s behind Williams' apparent slip down the pecking order?

After a superb return to form in 2014, finishing third in the championship, the expectation was that Williams’ had established a solid platform that would in 2015 enable it make the leap up to becoming Mercedes’ main rivals.

That this hasn’t happened and that the team has been eclipsed by Ferrari, has surprised many. So what has happened?

The headline news concerning the team’s troubles were initially made by Valtteri Bottas, whose injury in the build-up to the Australian Grand Prix kept him out of the race in Melbourne. That restricted the team to just one car and dropped points as Felipe Massa losing a podium battle with Ferrari on strategy and ending up in fourth place. The Williams qualified ahead of the Ferrari but finished behind it; on a tricky temporary circuit, was this a confirmation of the team’s place in the pecking order? The nature of the unrepresentative track served to mask deficiencies, which were exposed by Ferrari in Malaysia.

It is true that the conditions in Sepang played into the Scuderia’s hands whilst simultaneously hurting Williams’ performance but the message contained in Sebastian Vettel’s win, and Kimi Raikkonen’s fourth place, was clear – Williams has been bypassed by the Italian marque and despite still sitting third in the pecking order the Grove team have not made the step up to the status of best of the rest to Mercedes that was implied by last year’s championship finish.

It was expected that the team would fare better in the cooler climes of Shanghai and on a circuit with F1’s longest straight, but today Ferrari once again looked strong, with Sebastian Vettel third fastest in the morning and Kimi Raikkonen’s pace in the afternoon saw him close to the Mercedes on long runs and just 0.4s behind Hamilton’s timesheet-topping time on the soft tyre.

Bottas, the faster of two Williams drivers in the second session, was back in seventh 1.2s behind the fastest Ferrari. Massa, meanwhile, suffered a rear wing problem that sent him arrowing off track and into the barriers as he approached the turn 14 hairpin. The incident clearly upset the Brazilian who was seen to stamp back through the paddock swipegate after the crash.

It’s true that Fridays are not accurate barometers of Williams' potential; last season and so far this year the team has made a slow start to weekends, with performance being dialled in slowly in advance of qualifying, but the gains haven’t come so far and the question is why?

It's the downforce, stupid!

For technical director Pat Symonds the answer is simply a matter of downforce.

“This is going to sound repetitive but it’s more downforce,” he said today in Shanghai. “In terms of our power unit, we’re pretty happy with things. I think all the Mercedes customers are – so we need to keep working on the downforce and that will allow us to challenge harder.”

Bottas, though, disagrees with the assessment that the team is “pretty happy” with the current state of its Mercedes power unit. In the run-up to this weekend, the Finn said that the team is "still working on the driveability” of the new package and added that “it’s still not quite as good as maybe the end of last year."

There is a sense that Mercedes has worked on reliability perhaps at the expense of extra performance gains, while Ferrari in particular has thrown the kitchen sink at performance.

Bottas, post-Malaysia, also said the car’s race pace is not where it was. “We are missing race pace - and quite a big amount," he said after finishing fifth ahead of Massa. "With the ideal race, starting at the front, the gap wouldn't be that big but it is too big, much bigger than we expected. It shows we have a lot of work to do. There is a lot more potential, we just need to get more performance because it is possible others made huge steps."

Low speed corners again the Achilles Heel

One thing everyone at the team agrees on is that, somewhat similarly to last year, the FW37 is giving away performance in slow-speed corners. However that lack is this year being accentuated by Ferrari’s performance and by the step up made by teams such as Sauber and particularly Toro Rosso, whose STR10 is contrastingly good in slow speed corners.

“In traffic, we seem to struggle with traction a bit in slow-speed corners compared to Toro Rosso and Red Bull," said Bottas. "Toro Rosso seem to be much stronger where we are weak, which is slow-speed, mid to exit.”

Indeed, the Italian squad’s Carlos Sainz feels that the team is fast becoming a match for Williams.

"I really feel like we have a great car on the corners; we are at the level of Williams in terms of downforce and corner speeds,” he said after the Sepang race. "We just need the top speed that hopefully through the year comes, and we can start fighting with them."

Williams’ Head of Vehicle Performance Rob Smedley was brutally honest regarding Williams’ issues after the race in Malaysia, which was also hampered by the kind of finger trouble in pit stops that more than once cost the team points last year.

“There is a car package based deficit [to Mercedes and Ferrari] and it is not as if we should shy away from that,” he said. “We have to work hard to improve that. But at the same time, currently, we have to look at our tyre management and see how we manage the tyres.

“Why were there cars in the race that could do one less stop than us? That is a really key point. And it is not that we look at it afterwards and say we could have done one less stop. We couldn't.

“We have just got to go away and do our due diligence and we will do it right and we will find the right answers.”

He also pinpointed the pit stop errors in Malaysia as a problem that must be addressed.

"We have work to do. We have to improve the consistency of the pit stops as we had some good pit stops but then both cars had some slow pit stops," he said.

"The positive thing is they were two problems which we haven't encountered before. One was getting the tyre blanket off during the double pit stop, so it's a procedural thing, we just didn't take the blanket off quick enough.

"The second one was with Felipe. The jack didn't engage properly on the rear crash structure so we didn't get the rear of the car off.

"We have got to go away and look at it and understand what has happened and tidy up and make sure it doesn't happen again."

Symonds though is ultimately more forgiving of the team’s start to the season, pointing to Bottas’ absence in Australia and a far from optimum race in Malaysia as perhaps unforeseen occurrences that have taken the gloss of the team’s start.

“I think there’s a fair bit more to come,” he said today. “Obviously in Australia our biggest handicap was only having one car entered because of the problems Valtteri had with his back. That takes a big hit in your total points for the year.

“We’re in a tough competition now, Ferrari have moved on a long way and we wish to fight them – and we will continue to fight them. So, I think that the first two races, they weren’t great for us.

“That said, we’ve come away from them with half as many points again as we scored in those first two races last year. But if you look historically, over the last five years, to finish second in the championship, you need to be scoring 22.2 points per race. To finish third, you need 18.6 – so we’re a little bit behind the curve at the moment (15 pts average per race) but I hope we can catch up on it.”