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Williams to review poor start

Both Williams cars are yet to finish a grand prix this season © Sutton Images

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Williams has said that its start to the season has been well below expectations, and that it will be conducting a review of the team.

After an encouraging pre-season during which the car appeared to show genuine pace, the opening two grands prix have been disappointing for the team. Pastor Maldonado has been the first man to retire from both races, while Rubens Barrichello has also failed to finish a race. With qualifying performances not as competitive as Williams had hoped either, chairman Adam Parr has said that it has "come up short".

"Like everyone at Williams, I am both surprised and frustrated with our start," Parr said. "In spite of having an ambitious concept for the FW33, the benefit of continuity with our engine, and moving into our second season with Rubens, we have come up short. It is particularly bad in view of our relative strength in pre-season testing and the exceptional amount of work that everyone across Williams has put into this car."

Parr said that while the team did have some upgrades planned for the next race in China, it was going to be reviewing the structure of the team to ensure a similarly poor start does not occur in future.

"First, we have to understand where we are strong and where we are weak. We have had some notable areas of success with the FW33 and we can build on these. We also have some promising improvements coming through for Shanghai and Istanbul and we need to see how these perform. We also need to get on top of the reliability issues because these not only affect immediate performance, they also absorb resources that should be focused on improvement.

We will move forward, but that does not alter the fact that we have started too far behind. Therefore, we will be looking not only at how to address the short-term issues - we will be working together to strengthen the team for 2012 and beyond. Every aspect will be reviewed, nothing is sacred, but we will do this methodically and not in a reactive way."

Technical director Sam Michael agreed that the opening two races had not gone well for the team, and said that there were a lot of questions to be answered after the Malaysian Grand Prix.

"Our performance was well below expectations in many areas in Sepang. This is not acceptable for us and we'll be thoroughly reviewing all aspects of our lack of performance before Shanghai. Ultimately the performance and reliability of the car is down to the engineering group and we'll respond accordingly."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.