Williams I think were a disappointment, because everyone associates them with being a top team and with the level of engineering there, they should produce something which is a very user friendly package. We didn’t see that. We saw a car package that wasn’t easy to handle. One minute there would be inspirational performances - like in Monte Carlo with
Mark Webber - and the next they would completely drop off and be at the back of the grid. It was a huge level of weakness and very different to what we have seen Williams do over the last decade. That has got them pretty much to the bottom of the pot and they have now got to climb back up. Maybe now with a new partnership with
Toyota engines there will be a bit more structure and they can move forward. It is not going to be an easy one - but Williams have got a lot of depth and a lot of heritage and you would expect a lot more.
Q:
What did you make of the two
Red Bull outfits - RBR and STR? Were you surprised they didn’t pool their resources?
MB:
I was surprised more than anything that Red Bull Racing didn’t produce a little bit more. When Adrian Newey joined I thought his influence would show up more quickly but that didn’t seem to be the case. There seems to be a lot more focus going on to produce something for 2007, which is maybe the right situation. You just anticipated that something more would happen and in many ways RBR looked like they were biding time and just trying to get to the end of it with a lot more expectations on ‘07. I guess that was a disappointment more than anything to see that going on.
As for Toro Rosso, I felt there would definitely be more results coming out of them, especially as they had that V10 package. I thought that would have been more of a help for them throughout the season, but it never really showed up. I think with [Vitantonio] Liuzzi and [Scott] Speed, they struggled a bit. Speed made a number of errors which were quite costly. Liuzzi at times showed some inspiration and some pace and all of a sudden you thought: ‘This is the guy that we have heard so much about and he is starting to turn it on’. But that wasn’t always the case. There were also times when
STR didn’t look like they were contenders to achieve anything what-so-ever. So, you would anticipate they would be a stronger package next year.
