Williams admit regret at not pushing for Formula 1’s new budget cap to be introduced in 2020.
Next season will see spending on car development limited to $175m, but that has left the top three teams with a window of opportunity to get a head start on the new 2021 cars by simply increasing their budget for this year.
And by doing that, Williams believe, F1 bosses have scuppered the one goal they hoped to achieve, more competition.
“We can’t afford to run parallel programs, so we’re going to – at some point – make that decision to transition over and put the full resource behind the FW44, so it’s not easy,” deputy team boss Claire Williams said via FormulaSpy.
“And with hindsight, which is a wonderful thing, I wish we had brought the cost cap in for this year so that we didn’t have this issue with the top three teams being able to spend as much as they possibly can going into 2021.
“It’s going to be a piece of financial management from all us to manage those resources going into next year and just being able to do the best job we can.”
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And Williams, who perhaps look at 2021 their best chance to be competitive again after a torrid past two years, also accept the push to be better-placed next year will impact their 2020 development too.
“Clearly this is an important year for us, we’ve had two bad campaigns over 2018 and 2019 and we’ve always said we’ve got to get this year right,” she added.
“I think we’ve started on a good path, but we’ve still got work to do.
“We have plans in the pipeline to ensure that we’re bringing upgrades over the course of this year, but probably like most other teams up and down the paddock, those upgrade pipelines are going to be, somewhat curtailed, maybe versus last year, or the year before because we all have limited resources at the back end of this field, unfortunately.”