A place to discuss the characteristics of the cars in Formula One, both current as well as historical. Laptimes, driver worshipping and team chatter do not belong here.
This is the speculation thread about the 2019 car from Williams. Rumors, articles, ideas and fantasies about the car can be posted here. Once the car gets officially launched, this thread will be closed and discussion continues in the official thread.
Basically with the team coming open this year about stopping the development of the FW41 in order to have a better 2019 i think that the car is going to be much better. Im not saying top 6 finishes but it will be able to clinch points here and there, and the reason they are not going to be on top of the midfield is because you have Renault and Mclaren which have double the budget unlike Williams. Cant wait to see what Kubica is going to do in that car and how is he going to cope against Russell.
Points are going to be harder to come by, McLaren, Renault, Haas, Racing Point, TR, and Sauber will all be fighting for points finishes. However I doubt that Williams will be backmarkers, maybe one or two races.
Let me put in my prediction: For various reasons other teams will make much more progress, so Williams will again be last. Eventuelly they'll run into financial issues, so at the end of the year or maybe next winter I think they'll be in real trouble and approaching administration.
Williams lost a total of 8 sponsors, including Martini, SMP and probably all the Stroll's backing and gained only Acronis and Orlen. Last year they got a total of 75m from FIA, this year it's going to be a lot less. I obviously don't have a data but I guess they'll end up with 2/3 of their last year's budget.
On the other hand, they have a much better lineup now and Paddy has settled in properly. Robert have been concentrating on fixing the sim as soon as Williams realised it doesn't corelate with reality (which I think has been a primary reason for woeful 2018 season) and hopefully their CFD data improved in reliability. They also gave up on FW41 pretty early. All in all, I expect Williams to bounce back from the very bottom and possibly join the party in midfield from the get go. I'm affraid they won't be kings in inseason development pace though, due to low budget. Aero rules changes should suit them more should they revert to the low drag philosophy.
No point to going low drag any more, all the performance is in low speed corners, and having consistent downforce. They know what they did wrong, well and painfully aware of it. The problem is everyone else is aware of where huge gains can be made and already have far more data as their designs began exploiting this area since 2017.
Everyone that worked with this area kept finding chunks of time. While McLaren and Williams had desigs which never used the bargeboards like the others, because they had different concepts. Shame it took 2 years to learn, but with 2019 the surface area of the foot plate on the bargeboards increase. This means bigger mid wing, and more potential for sealing the diffuser. So IMO Toto wasn't lying when he said the grid could be shaken up.
I strongly suspect the FW42 won’t repeat the extreme undercut of the FW41’s sidepods, based on Paddy’s interview in Racecar Engineering in November: “It does not take much studying to see that we have very much the largest undercuts in the pit lane, and it is clearly not a winning formula, certainly not in the way we have delivered it.” Teams like RBR and Sauber virtually lost the undercut altogether, and other teams that stuck with a degree of undercut moderated it, apart, perhaps, from McLaren.
He also made the point that any team has a certain amount of capacity, and when you’re using that capacity to track back and find out where you went wrong, you’re not using it to advance, while other people are. The team could short-cut that to a degree by dropping development on the FW41 as soon as the ‘19 regs were announced, but I don’t think that will be enough to make up lost ground. So while I doubt the team will have anything like the disaster they did in ‘18, I also doubt they’ll be back to where they were in ‘16-‘17, let alone ‘14. Given the overhaul of the entire design function, which in itself is going to use up capacity, 2019 is probably going to be a building year.
Whether or not the FW42 will take a different path altogether, based on some of Lowe’s comments, is harder to tell. “There is now a lot of work back at base to revisit and we also need to look at how we design cars generally,” suggests a total overhaul might be on the cards. There are quite a few suggestions that Williams’ complete approach to creating a car has changed, as the FW41 “uncovered a range of areas in which we have slipped behind in terms of our capability”. He also suggests the team is also looking to make “a big step” in 2019 (that’s not just rhetoric, earlier in the interview he admitted that trying to make an equivalent step for 2018 was what got them into so much trouble).
They’re not going to go back to the FW40 philosophy, though, to my mind. “It should not be said that the car has not improved. This [the FW41] is a better car than the FW40. It’s just that the sport moves week by week, and we have not been moving as fast as others, we have under-developed and been out-developed. Some of that is because we made choices that were too aggressive, but at the time we made them they made sense, we were ambitious, we had to be.” In other words, the FW41 was still better than an evolved FW40 would have been, and it would have been pointless to try to compete with a warmed-over FW40. I get the feeling the FW36-40 concept was played out, anyway - as others have pointed out, the ‘17 reg change removed much of the benefit of a low-drag philosophy, and you surely get into diminishing returns.
I’ll take a punt and say that they’ll be a little ahead of Racing Point and McLaren, but closer to the back of the midfield than the front, at least at the start of the year.
On the predictions of financial doom, I don’t buy it. Williams has always been financially sound, even in the less successful years, and this time they are relaxed enough about it to have hired a driver with no financial inducements at all - which must be the first time in a decade that is the case. There’s the PKN Orlen deal, and I imagine there will be more Polish sponsors on the way. I presume there will be some money associated with the development driver too.
My understanding is that Williams' engineering consulting provides them a back end on which to fall if they decide competitive failure in F1 is costing them too much. So we'd probably see them back in a couple years as they're born of F1.
Williams has been trotting out some unconventional concepts over the years but the 41 was sort of an amalgam of every current trend, kind of the quintessential exemplar of the team on the grid that buys the bait. They need to put together a package that works for itself and doesn't hamper further development. Which, sounds maybe like what they're planning to do?
the four immutable forces:
static balance
dynamic balance
static imbalance
dynamic imbalance
Williams has been trotting out some unconventional concepts over the years but the 41 was sort of an amalgam of every current trend, kind of the quintessential exemplar of the team on the grid that buys the bait. They need to put together a package that works for itself and doesn't hamper further development. Which, sounds maybe like what they're planning to do?
I remain fascinated by the FW41’s sidepods and exactly what they were expected to achieve. They seem like an extrapolation and combination of Ferrari and Merc ideas, with the undercut taken to (or beyond) the logical extreme, but not really integrated, just stuck together. I agree, the whole car seemed a bit like that. I suppose it’s not too strange, given the presence of both former Merc and Ferrari technical people, but I feel like they need to find a Williams concept again. I’m glad they went radical, it shows the ambition is there. I wouldn’t want to see Williams taking the FI approach of merely executing a conservative car well. If the talk about new approaches to conceiving the car is more than just talk, then we’ll see some more creativity.
Edit - further thoughts. I was surprised to learn that back in 2016-17, Williams had the shortest wheelbase and the highest rake of any team on the grid. I rather had the impression that it’s a bit easier to get stability and aero efficiency from a long wheelbase-low rake set up, with certain trade-offs (with the Ferrari short sidepod coming at it from the other direction, taking the advantages of the short wheelbase and mitigating the aero shortcomings), so it surprised me that Williams had gone to the other end of the scale to their engine supplier. I kind of expected them to go in more of a Merc direction under Paddy’s leadership, but he was evidently content to take ideas from the design team and let them run with them. I wonder if the failure of the extreme short sidepod interpretation will see them up the wheelbase a bit and focus on regaining stability. They’d have had to have increased the wheelbase anyway if they were going to take the Merc gearbox, which I understand they explored, so there must have been some consideration of that design concept.
Their situation last year is similar to the Ferrari replicas that Toyota churned out in the early 2000s. They thought that they could instantly produce a winner by copying but they had poor understanding of the true concepts
Paddy says he fell into a trap that fixing few issues would yield results rather than looking at every area to improve.
Would suggest that they are quiet lagging in some areas to other teams such as gear box casing, gear box internals, suspension, braking, internal aero, weight reduction etc.
Paddy says he fell into a trap that fixing few issues would yield results rather than looking at every area to improve.
Would suggest that they are quiet lagging in some areas to other teams such as gear box casing, gear box internals, suspension, braking, internal aero, weight reduction etc.
Overall I think that’s true, although Paddy has been quite complimentary about the metal gearbox casing and gone on record as saying that the performance benefits of going carbon are small and don’t necessarily outweigh the advantages of the metal one - it’s a lot quicker to build and cheaper, so you can spend the money saved elsewhere on the car etc. Not sure if the same is the case with the suspension. On weigh reduction, I recall Williams was so underweight in 2014 that there were no more benefits to be gained with ballast placement they actually started looking to increase the weight of certain components in 2015 as they might as well make them stronger - although things have moved on a lot since then and I don’t know how they were with weight in 2017-18. With a short car I can’t see that they had too many problems relative to e.g. Merc. I think it’s pretty clear Williams’ biggest problems by far were aerodynamic, and that has been the case for a long time. They benefitted for a short time when the regs knocked everyone’s aero back to something a lot simpler - I believe they were one of the only teams never to get a grip on the Coanda exhaust which was effectively banned in 2014 - but as understanding of aero has become more complex, they’ve fallen behind again. But it’s obviously not going to be a quick fix. I do get the sense that WR have a better idea of where they’ve gone wrong, organisationally, now.
