Williams to test new seat belts at Suzuka

Bottas was forced to pit during the Marina Bay race when his belts came loose – and subsequent investigations by the team could not pinpoint an exact reason for what happened.

With the belts being of vital importance for safety, Williams has decided that it will switch from Willans to OMP as the supplier.

Tests with OMP will be conducted in Friday practice at Suzuka to check everything is okay, and then the plan is for Bottas and Felipe Massa to switch over fully from the United States Grand Prix.

Williams performance chief Rob Smedley said: "It is a very difficult thing to understand, and it has apparently come undone after 30 laps of a race.

"Unless you find a fault with the buckle, seat belts very rarely - I mean, never – come undone. So something else has happened to make the seat belt come undone.

"Whatever it is, whatever has forced the seat belt open after 30-odd laps, whether it is Valtteri touching it with his gloves or his overalls riding up, it shouldn't happen. It should never, never happen.

"When you are talking about the safety of the drivers, that is of paramount importance over and above everything including reliability and performance in the car.

"We are all racers but the safety of drivers and personnel in general is the absolute number one priority. So it was a really, really disappointing situation to be in.

"We are going to change manufacturer. We will test them out in Japan, which is the earliest we could get them, with a view to - if everything is alright, once we have gone away after Japan and analysed the situation - to racing them in America. It is a reasonably good reaction, I would say."

Smedley explained that Williams would delay any switch to Austin simply because it wanted to have time to properly analyse the running from Japan.

"Anything that you do in the car, especially from a safety aspect, we do need some mileage on them," he said. "We want to be able to run them to get 600km on them over the course of two Fridays, to simply be able to see there are no issues.

"You wouldn't want to send a driver into the race without that – so we want to get mileage under our belts."