Williams chief technical officer discusses their start to the season
Tuesday 12 May 2015 13:52, UK
Sky Sports Digital spoke to Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds in Bahrain about their start to the season.
Ferrari have been ahead of Williams at all of the races held so far. Are they out of sight already?
Pat Symonds: "It’s ominous, isn’t it? Australia and Malaysia are really quite unusual circuits for different reasons, but China is actually reasonably sitting in the median of the various things we have to deal with. And for them to out-perform us there was disappointing. Even if, in qualifying, we did split them it was more due to Kimi [Raikkonen]’s mistake than our performance.
“I think we can see the trends occurring now. We are slightly behind them in qualifying – not so much – but in race trim it’s a significant amount. So we need to do a bit to pull back up to them."
Is it more a case of certain other teams having made a relative step forward this year? Or is this year’s car not as good as last year’s?
PS: “Definitely it’s not problems with us. We’re happy that we’ve taken steps forward. In fact, we know from measurement that we’ve taken steps forward; we know from Barcelona performance [in pre-season testing] we’ve taken steps forward. And, to be honest, we know from driver comments that we’ve taken steps forward. But obviously those steps are not as great as those that Ferrari have taken."
Is there any particular weakness in the Williams compared to the Ferrari?
PS: “Not that we’ve established so far. I think that Ferrari have certainly gained an enormous amount on the power unit relative to ours and particularly, I think, their ability to use the power unit strongly right through the race, that looks quite impressive. But we have followed them at various times in the race and our drivers don’t really identify particular areas of weakness. They do identify that we are much stronger in the quick corners, but that’s about it.”
People have suggested that Mercedes would prefer to see Williams between them and Ferrari and so would be prepared to help you with the engine. Is that possible?
PS: “No, not at all. The power unit hardware is obviously homologated – there can be no differences and we can’t suddenly change things. In terms of software, the undertaking is that all the customer teams will run the same. And, generally speaking, that’s running the same as the works team as well.
“They reserve the right to be a step ahead of us in terms of what they do, but it’s not something they’ve had to do yet. So absolutely not; we all run the engines in a similar manner.”
Lotus also have Mercedes power now and they showed stronger pace in China. Do you see them as a real threat as the season progresses?
PS: “No. I think that they’ve got a good car and they’ve moved forward a lot and well done to them. But like many teams, they really are quite tight on budget and therefore I think the development they’ll be able to do is somewhat limited.
“It’s early to say that they’re not a threat – they’re not a threat right at the moment. And my supposition is that it’ll be difficult for them to out-develop us. But one never knows.”
So doesn’t the same therefore apply to yourselves and Ferrari? Because presumably they have a bigger budget than Williams.
PS: “It makes it more challenging. Yes, without a doubt, Ferrari’s a much bigger organisation than Williams with enormous funding. That increases our challenge. But it was exactly like that last year; we started the season behind Ferrari, we finished the season in front of Ferrari. So it’s not a given that we can’t keep up.”
As a consequence of the back injury he suffered in Melbourne, Valtteri Bottas had to change his driving position. Has he had any difficulty adapting?
PS: “No, not at all. It’s a little movement of the pedals, nothing else. It’s not a new seat or anything like that. And in the last two events, all the way through the weekend including the race, he’s had absolutely no problems whatsoever. So I think we’re over that one.”
A criticism of Williams last season was that maybe they were a little risk averse when it came to strategy calls. Is that something that’s been rectified?
PS: “By rectify you’re assuming that it’s a valid criticism! Our job last year was to really restore the team to a front-running position. And in order to do that, we had to be risk averse. It was the correct strategy to employ and the season proved that it was the correct strategy to employ.
“Sometimes, journalists tend to take something you say and blow it up way beyond what it was intended to be. Of course, we balanced our risk and I think that’s a better way of describing it. I study risk analysis quite intently because it’s a major part of my job – from my days when I used to do a lot of race strategy, it became an important factor to understand.
“So analysis of races leads you to certain conclusions. Some people may think we are risk averse and they may also look at situations and think ‘okay, that shows the team are risk averse’. I’m thinking now particularly of Austria last year.
“What perhaps people don’t know about Austria last year [where Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas qualified on the front row but finished behind Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton in the race] is that we couldn’t run full energy deployment because of various temperature problems. What we had to do was to ensure that we were not beaten by Ferrari and if you look at the point of the last pit stop, we were in fact a couple of seconds clear of them.
“Had we been inclined to take more risk and tried to race Mercedes at the front, we would have been left with having to severely limit our energy deployment later in the race, and we’d undoubtedly have been overtaken by Ferrari. So risk averse to me is just sheer common sense strategic thinking.”
Back to the question of budgets, but in the context of the financial difficulties some teams are facing. Should the sport divide its commercial revenues more equally?
PS: “I think Formula 1 still must be a meritocracy, any sport should be. There’s nothing wrong with a meritocracy and surely that’s the definition of sport, isn’t it?
“What one may question is whether the strata within that meritocracy are correct – and that’s quite a deep question. The fact is that all us teams signed commercial agreements and perhaps the time to ask that question would have been before we signed those agreements, rather than sign the agreements and then afterwards decide that perhaps we shouldn’t have done. Monday morning quarterbacks are always right, aren’t they?"
