In 2018, Williams has moved down from its coveted fifth place to a dismal tenth at the team’s standing and everyone, including its tech chief Paddy Lowe, has not explained why the team is faltering so much.
But Auto Motor and Sport has figured out why the British team is struggling so much. The English outfit tried to copy Mercedes cooling system and failed. To compensate for that, they have to open their bodywork, and that is hurting the aerodynamics.
The Grove based team has been at the bottom of the standings since the first race of the season. In Shanghai, a track which has always been good to Williams, the outfit finished the race in 14th and 15th place, a full 16 seconds behind points reach.
The team is a full second away from their target and their drivers are yet to find grip and balance. In case you are wondering why their performance has dipped so much, look at the car’s rear end.
The problem
Williams’s tech chief Paddy Lowe tried to copy the cooling system used by his Ex-team Mercedes to save time. But the Silver Arrows concept was complex and had too many moving parts. Some components needed more cooling than other. So the copying did not work as the team expected.
Now if the car is closed, it overheats the engine and if the team opens up the bodywork, the aerodynamics suffers and the car loses a lot of downforce in the rear, and thus the drivers cannot find the grip.
There was a long discussion between Mercedes boss Toto Wolff and Lance Stroll’s father Lawrence Stroll about the cooling issue. After the discussion, there is a rumour that Williams is looking for help from Mercedes to resolve their cooling issue. A Williams engineer said “If we solve the cooling problem, we’ll gain eighth-tenths in one single swoop.”
