Williams insist that they are improving after today’s Spanish Grand Prix, despite failing to score points yet again.
Pastor Maldonado finished fifteenth despite starting from ninth and Rubens Barrichello could only manage seventeenth, but Sam Michael blames the competitiveness of the midfield on this poor result.
“Although our end positions don’t look like it, we are improving but it is extremely tight in the midfield,” said the Williams technical director. “If you don’t get it right, you end up 15th instead of 10th.
“The main thing for us now is to keep focussed and to improve the upgrades we bring to the car. Over the next couple of races in particular we need to get the front and rear wings and the diffuser working. Today we had a problem with the rear jack on both cars so we will look into that before Monaco.”
Maldonado sounded pretty downbeat after his afternoon in Barcelona: “It was a difficult race,” said the Venezuelan rookie. “We didn't have a great start, which is something we need to work on. We then struggled to keep on the pace and unfortunately our strategy didn't help us. But we finished the race and so we now have more data to work with. We need to push hard and concentrate on improving our race pace for Monaco.”
Barrichello also gave the team a stark message: “I had a very tough race,” he said. “Starting on primes meant the base wasn't good but we had the option so it should have been better at the end. Unfortunately, we had more problems today. First, during the pitstop and then with KERS again, which lost us a lot of time. That's another race with no points. We need to improve.”
