Williams has suggested their Formula 1 season starts now in terms of bringing updates to their 2019 car.
The British outfit has been stuck at the back of the grid and well off the pace of the rest after a winter of continued problems left them behind schedule.
Last weekend in Baku, the situation got worse as both George Russell and Robert Kubica suffered big crashes, with the Briton’s caused by a loose drain cover which cracked the chassis.
It led to concerns that Williams wouldn’t have the spare parts to compete, but deputy team boss Claire Williams claims that issue has been resolved.
“We are now in a position where we have all our race quantities, we have the quality on those race quantities that we needed,” she explained via F1i.com.
“Now we’re looking to bring the upgrades that have literally been sitting on a shelf as we’ve cleared the backlog out of manufacturing
“So there is some light at the end of the tunnel, I think China demonstrated that we’ve brought a little bit of performance to the car, but we’re still far too far behind the ninth-placed team at the moment.”
The pre-season problems lead to technical director Paddy Lowe taking a period of leave which is continuing, and team co-founder Patrick Head coming in to help.
“Patrick coming in obviously for us is a great thing,” Williams declared.
“He’s acting as a guide for our team of engineers at the moment, just making sure that they’re doing everything that they should be doing.
“We haven’t had the best year, clearly everybody has seen that. It started with not getting our chassis to testing, and we’ve had to really play catch up off the back of that.”
Some questions have also been raised about Williams and whether she and the team are being proactive enough.
“We’re doing a lot of work back at Williams,” Claire insisted. “If anyone thinks that we’re just hoping for a miracle or that things will just go our way at some point, that’s not the case.
“A lot of work has been going on to make sure that we put ourselves in the right position. Obviously, Patrick is playing a role in that as well.”
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Finally, in Baku, Williams also put to bed any rumours of the team being up for sale, after suggestions of talks with Russian businessman Dmitry Mazepin.
“Yeah, I saw those stories, I paid little attention to them,” she responded.
“I haven’t met Mr Mazepin to talk about that. We had a brief conversation in the mid-part of last year, but subsequent to that there have been no conversations.
“I’d just like to be really categorical about it: Williams is not for sale. I have no intention of putting Williams up for sale. I don’t see why we would.”
