Williams co-owner Patrick Head has said that the team needs to raise its game if it is to remain in the midfield battle this season, and has told the workforce at its Grove base to return more attention to developing the FW30.
Head admitted over the British Grand Prix weekend that the team had already been allocating a lot of resources the design and build process for next season but, with
Red Bull,
Renault,
Toyota and even Toro Rosso all showing signs of moving ahead of Williams in recent races, has decided that some time needs to be spent overhauling the 2008 machine.
"We've been switching quite a lot of attention towards 2009, and our aero programme has been working in part on 2009 for quite some time," he told
Reuters at
Silverstone, "We recently moved the majority of the aero programme to be on 2009, but we are in the process of 'retro-putting' some attention back to 2008 because we need to do better than we are doing at the moment."
Nico Rosberg's podium in the season-opener at Melbourne seems a long time ago now, with the team struggling to score regular points and slipping to sixth in the constructors' championship at the halfway mark in the campaign. The FW30 does not appear to have the versatility of some of its rivals, but has not been helped by some hit-and-miss performances from its drivers, notably young 'team leader' Rosberg.
The German has failed to score in his last four races, a run precipitated by a big crash in Monaco, where he all but destroyed his car with a fast off at the Swimming Pool section. Since then, he found himself caught up in the same pit-lane controversy as
Lewis Hamilton in Canada, with the resulting ten-place penalty affecting his performance in France and mystery handling problems leaving him at the back of the grid in Britain.
