Williams has made “no fundamental concept changes” to its 2019 car with the new FW43 despite a poor season last year.

The late delivery of last season’s car, coupled with a poor design left Williams comfortably slowest of the 10 teams on the grid. It focused on addressing some key weaknesses during last year and design director Doug McKiernan says the team needed to maximize its resources, so decided against radical changes.

“The team at the factory have been working incredibly hard on the development of the car for the 2020 season,” McKiernan said. “We have paid significant attention to understanding the problem areas of the FW42 and we have carefully chosen parts of the car to develop, those that would give us the most performance for the resources we have.

“The main concept behind the FW43 is that it is a continuous development of the FW42, with no fundamental concept changes to the layout. The most important indicator that we are on the right path will be the level of correlation we have between the tool kit we use to design the car and what the track data is telling us.

“There has been a healthy development rate in the wind tunnel, and we have found reasonable improvements in the cooling efficiency. The team has addressed the mechanical issues that affected it in 2019, these include the brakes and the overall weight of the car. We have made some good progress across these areas and will continue to focus on them during the season.”

While deputy team principal Claire Williams highlights the team’s fighting spirit in tackling a long road back to competitiveness, chief engineer Adam Carter says there have been clear benefits to being able to do continuous development of the previous concept.

“The initiatives that we put in place to drive performance across all disciplines within the engineering department are evident in the design and development of the FW43,” Carter said. “It’s been great to see the hard work starting to pay off.

“The decision to retain some of the core architecture of the FW42 means there has been less resource invested in developing new concepts, which in turn has rewarded the design team with greater bandwidth to optimize their work, evident in both packaging and component detail. By preserving some key parameters, it has allowed for an uninterrupted development program within aerodynamics in order to maximize the efficiency of the resources.

“As we head towards the pre-season tests and then onto the race season, the most important measure will be the progress relative to our peers, along with our intention of continuing our recent record of reliability.

“Later this week, we will be looking at our single timed lap pace, our long run pace and the feedback from the drivers to understand where we are and what we do next. We have teams, both at the track and back at Grove, that will be delving into all aspects that define that lap time during the pre-season tests to ensure we are in the best possible place ahead of the first race in Australia.”