Claire Williams says team need to modernise: Company still has "post-it notes"
F1 News
Williams spent yet another season parked at the back of the grid. Various sponsors and technicians have already left and now the problems must be removed before the issue becomes too deep. According to Claire Williams, a small part of the fix will be to modernise some of their methods.
Stuck in the past
Williams were very successful in the past and some of the 'technology' used in those times may still be in place today. In an interview with Autosport, boss Williams believes the team need to get some "proper systems in place" rather than the outdated post-it notes.
"Each area has a business manager in that planning function that is responsible for the design office or in the windtunnel for ATF, or whatever it may be so that that person is responsible for those people in aero hitting their deadlines. But that planning function is responsible for so much more. They need to understand the capacity in every area as well and need to understand how long it takes to make that one small part of the car," she said.
"There's a huge amount of data capture that's had to go on as well because you can imagine a team like ours has been around for a long time and may have been doing processes in quite a loose way - post-it notes going around, for example - and we need to get out of that and have proper systems in place. We have to bring Williams into the modern era of F1 racing. I'm not saying that it was so prehistoric and it wasn't that, I don't want to give that impression, because it wasn't.
"We needed to just bring it even further forward."
Across the last 42 races, Williams have scored just eight points. One of the most striking issues came almost 12 months ago when the team failed to show up for the start of pre-season testing in Barcelona. It seems as if Williams are on a modernisation path which should sort some of the main problems out and help them develop the 2019 car into the 2020 challenger.