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Williams credits new team structure for revival

The wait for victory has been a long one © Sutton Images

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Sir Frank Williams has acknowledged that that the hiring of just a few people in the right areas has spurred his team on to get back to winning ways.

The Williams team secured a surprise but well deserved first grand prix victory since 2004 with Pastor Maldonado's win in Spain. And with the departure of technical director Sam Michael to McLaren at the end of last season, the hiring of Jason Somerville and Mark Gillan as well as a few key others seems to have had the desired effect.

"It wasn't a major reorganisation, a few new people arrived, there was a bit of shuffling around," said Williams at Monaco. "One or two people can make quite a difference and given that it's a complicated matter, as all these people here will tell you, to put the right group of people together and get them to fire on all cylinders. It comes together once in a while with the car and the driver and everything working very well. We took our chance and got it.

"Nothing significant has changed. It's the same approach, the same reliability. If we've gone a bit quicker then it's because the car is quicker and that would have come, more than anything else, from the wind tunnel and from the drivers being particularly tuned in to a particular circuit."

The Williams team had endured a barren run between the time of Juan Pablo Montoya's last victory and Pastor Maldonado's recent win. And Williams admits the wait has not been a comfortable one.

"Well I thought it was eight years actually but if it was seven that that sounds a little bit better but it's an embarrassing amount of time for a man with a big ego.

"I've been racing long enough to know that you should approach any race with a considerable amount of pessimism and you get better after that. All grand prix teams are immensely professional and very few of them make any mistakes worth talking about during a season so it's hard to prise winners away from winning all the time. But whatever we did right, and I don't really know what that was, worked very fine and I'm just delighted to walk away with all those points and another number one on the scoreboard."

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