F1 News

Claire Williams admits situation is embarrassing for team

Claire Williams admits situation is "embarrassing" for team

20-02-2019 15:24
3
Author profile picture

Nicolás Quarles van Ufford

Deputy Williams team principal Claire Williams admits the situation the team's currently in is embarrassing for everyone, as the Grove-based team wasn't able to participate in the first two days of testing.

On the back of Williams' worst ever season in 2018, 2019 hasn't exactly gone to plan for Williams. They first announced they would miss Monday's testing, and later, they said they wouldn't make it to Tuesday either, sending their fans into a frenzy. 

"This is not a situation we anticipated," Claire Williams told a large group of journalists, including Motorsport.

"It's not a situation we ever wanted to find ourselves in.

"We're not just disappointed but it's embarrassing not bringing a race car to a circuit when everyone else has managed to do that.

"Particularly for a team like ours that has managed to deliver a race car to testing for the past 40-odd years. So we can only apologise."

When talking about the issues, Williams admitted that the issue arose pretty late, although she didn't specify what exactly went wrong.

"It became apparent quite late on actually, that we weren't going to make the shakedown and subsequently not make the first day.

"We thought we could get everything we needed together in order to make Tuesday. And then parts just weren't coming through as we hoped they would, and in the time we hoped they would or had in the plan. So we didn't make it until today.

"But I'm not going to go into any detail as to why that happened. I don't think it's appropriate to discuss the ins and outs of what went wrong. Completing that inquest anyway has not happened at Grove yet.

"We're clearly aware of some of the issues but it's too early to start discussing them in any detail and probably something we wouldn't do anyway. We need to resolve what went wrong so this doesn't happen again at Williams."