Williams believes not even a tripling of their budget could have turned around the flaws with their 2018 car.
The British team ended this past season bottom of the Constructors’ Championship with just seven points as an attempted change in design philosophy failed and left them at the back of the grid.
At the same time, there has been concerns raised about their financial future as sponsors have left and now prize money has reduced but even with more money, deputy team boss Claire Williams thinks the outcome would have probably been the same.
“I think the problems were related to the global car, if you like, we’ve had issues front to back,” she explained to Motorsport.com.
“So to try and make changes to bring performance to a car that was like that was always going to be difficult.
“We tried and we tried hard. It wasn’t through a lack of hard work, energy, motivation, I suppose it was just the flaws were too fundamental to rectify halfway through a season.
“I think even regardless of the amount of budget we could have thrown at it – we threw a lot of budget at it, even if we had tripled it I’m not convinced we would have changed its course.”
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A number of changes have been made within the Grove operation as they look to avoid a repeat next year with both the chief designer and aerodynamicist among the departures as well as engineering chief Rob Smedley.
Even so, Williams doesn’t expect the impact of the changes to be immediate, even if the flaws of the 2018 car are rectified.
“I think we have to be conscious of what we can achieve with the changes we’ve made,” Claire continued.
“Changes are always a good thing, it resets a balance, but I think in order to make a significant difference you need those changes to bed in for a while.
“As I’ve said repeatedly you don’t go from P5 to P10 without quite a few things that have gone wrong in your organisation and we are in the slow process of resolving all of those issues.
“We have 650 people in our team but I think we are still resource-limited when it comes to people to fix the mass of problems that we have. We can’t tackle everything all in one go.
“So we, therefore, have to temper those expectations as to what we can achieve in 2019 based on the resources we have to fix everything.”