F1 News
"You've got to hit rock bottom to know what your issues are"
- Nicolás Quarles van Ufford
While Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams insists a season like 2019 can never happen again, she does believe hitting "rock bottom" can help to identify what mistakes you've made to get there and where improvements should be made.
After a historically bad 2018, Williams followed it up with an even worse year in 2019, scoring just a single point in all 21 Grands Prix when Robert Kubica was classified 10th in Germany following a double disqualification for Alfa Romeo for having illegal mapping on their clutch.
The Grove-based side will have a new driver in 2020 as F2 runner-up Nicholas Latifi will join George Russell to form a very young line-up, much like they had in 2018 with Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin.
Claire Williams thinks that while there are things to be learned from the last two years of struggle, it also can absolutely not happen again in the coming years.
"It can't happen again," she said straight-away when talking to Autosport.
"You've got to sometimes hit rock bottom to know what your issues are because otherwise you just... sometimes you just go through these situations and you can get to where you need to get to by the skin of your teeth.
"But you actually need to understand what's going on in your system to make sure that you're not just getting somewhere by the skin of your teeth and you've got to have a plan and a proper process."
The problems in 2019 started in pre-season testing. They almost missed the entire first week of testing in Barcelona, meaning they missed out on crucial data collection by simply getting mileage on the car in different set-ups.
However, Williams revealed the period after pre-season testing was "incredibly useful" as they uncovered what exactly was going wrong and how they could fix their problems.
"I would say that the team responded really well to that [analysing weaknesses] because it can be quite difficult for people to be very open and honest in those situations, but we encouraged honesty within it.
"In any situation like that it can always be difficult for people to put their hands up and be honest and open.
"But our team was incredibly receptive to the process that we asked them to go through, which allowed us to put in place a load of plans in order to address the areas of weakness that were causing the issues in the first place."