Improvements found at Williams

The Williams team are hopeful that they have found some improvements during the in-season test at Barcelona following the Spanish Grand Prix.

The Formula One teams completed their second in-season test, with Williams confident that they have found a number of improvements which experienced Brazilian Felipe Massa will benefit from.

Massa has struggled in recent Grand Prix to compete with young team-mate Valtteri Bottas, with the Spanish result highlighting this current trend.

As Bottas went on to finish fifth for the second time this season, Massa finished a lap down in 13th.

Massa is now 22 points behind his team-mate in the Formula One standings, with Bottas 7th overall in the Championship.

‘The last two results haven’t been certainly what either we wanted from him or he wanted, Conversely, if you take the result before that in Bahrain, he was extremely quick all of the race and managed to look after his tyres better than [team-mate] Valtteri [Bottas]. Williams Head of Vehicle Performance Rob Smedley told Sky Sports.

‘For the last two rounds in China and Spain it’s been different. We sat down after the [latter] race and my message to everybody was that we have to really start to dig deep and start to look at why that’s happening. It’s no good just to say ‘oh, it’s this and it’s that’ and be very remiss about our approach. My approach is to always go through and look at every single detail even if that wastes a little bit of time going down certain avenues.

‘So we have come up with some very, very good analysis in a very short space of time. Luckily there was the test after the race in Barcelona so we were able to test some things could there, which worked. That just gives us all a great deal of confidence in our analysis methods and then going to test those methods in the track, it gives Felipe confidence that ‘I had a problem in the last two races, the guys have got stuck in and they’ve come out with a bunch of things, we’ve tested that all in Spain and it’s all worked’.

‘So he’s confident going into Monaco, we’re confident in him and I’m certainly happy with that round of work.’