Williams: Boss and driver ruing errors despite points boost

Claire Williams believes her team needs to avoid any more errors as she and the team balance an improved points tally in 2015, with a number of missed opportunities.

Her objective is beating Ferrari to second place in the Formula 1 constructor’s championship.

Williams is currently 82 points behind Ferrari in the team’s table, but the Grove-based squad has scored more points at this stage of the season than it did in 2014.

However, a series of high profile mistakes, including fitting a mix of tyres to Valterri Bottas’ car at the Belgian Grand Prix, has cost Williams a number of points over the course of this year.

Speaking in the team principal’s press conference ahead of the Singapore Grand Prix, Williams said: “We’re ahead on the number of points that we’ve scored so far this season versus last year, we were fourth in the constructors last year versus third at this point now.

“We believe we can close that gap to Ferrari and that is our objective for this coming weekend, we’ve got to get some more points and [also] extend that gap to Red Bull as well.

“I think that we’ve obviously made a few mistakes, certainly in the past couple of races, around our pitstops.

“But we know the issues, we’ve identified them, we were always very open and honest about what they are and as long as the next time we come to a race track and we don’t make the same mistakes then I’m happy with the work that the team does.”

Williams also acknowledged that her team needs to attract more funding if it is remain competitive in 2016.

She said: “Pat [Symonds, Williams’ technical director] and his team do a really great job with the resources that they have available to them. We obviously have to do a better job commercially to bring in some more revenue for them to give them a strong budget.

“But they know the job in hand and we’ve got a final year of stable technical regulations ahead of the changes that are coming in 2017, and we need to capitalise on that stability in order to make sure that we can bring the best car to the track when we start racing again next year.”

Driver Valtteri Bottas explained that he was disappointed with the 2015 season so far and while he felt Williams had improved on its 2014 form, other teams had gained more.

He said: “I’m not really that pleased for the results [of 2015]. Of course we aimed to make a step forward [and] we improved from last year, but not really [when] compared to the others.

“As a team I think everyone in the team is expecting more [next year] and we are aiming to do better in the future. I am staying with the team and it’s very nice to start building from this because I still think we are not yet at the peak and we can definitely do better.

Bottas is yet to score a world championship point at either of F1’s two full street circuits, in Monaco or Singapore, as the Williams’ struggle for rear downforce levels is exacerbated on those tracks.

But Bottas explained that team had brought updates to Singapore specifically to generate more downforce at the rear of the car and that he was aiming to score points in the race.

He said: “We’re going to fix [the lack of points] this weekend. For sure Monaco was a big struggle last year and this year. We need to improve the car so that it’s quick in these kinds of places.

“We do have some updates for the car here for the front wing and the rear brake ducts – hopefully those create a bit more downforce.”