Williams not dwelling on poor season ending
Williams' Valtteri Bottas has called upon his Williams team to fight back strongly in 2016 following a very poor ending of the season where pace and team organisation were not up to expectations.
The young Finn mentioned Williams as a whole realise big gains are needed after a disappointing final part of the season.
"Of course that was not the way we wanted to finish the season, bit in the end this could be could", said Valtteri Bottas.
"This was a proper wake-up call that we really need to raise our game if we want to challenge for the wins next year. We all know the facts, we need to find big gains with the car during the winter, and there are operational things we need to do better."
With that mention, Bottas pointed towards mistakes the team has made recently in strategy and pitstops, highlighted by an unsafe release this weekend that cost him an extra pitstop and a time penalty.
Still, that doesn't appear to have hurt his motivation and hope of having a better Williams under him next season.
"Everyone knows it and we are fully motivated to fix these things and have a much better season next year. I need to say a big thank you to everyone in the team because we achieved third place in the Constructors' and with this team I managed to be fifth place in the Drivers' Championship. This season gave me some good things to remember, like a couple of very special podiums, but we want more so none of us are fully satisfied yet."
The team's head of Performance Engineering, Rob Smedley enlighted why Williams may have been struggling in the final part of the season.
"It wasn't the way we wanted to end our season," Smedley said.
"We will go away and analyse how we could have done better at this race. We seemed to go forward in pace compared to Force India and Red Bull, but starting behind them in qualifying didn't help us. We shouldn't dwell on this race too much, we've had a really good season and finished a solid third again, which is important to the growth of the team. I'm incredibly proud of the way this team is constantly growing and improving.
"Our focus has been on the 2016 car for quite a long time, now we've got a long winter ahead and we have to come out the starting blocks in a full sprint next year."
