The Williams Racing team have now launched their 2021 challenger the FW43B. But just as quickly the team has made it clear that they are committed to the continued upgrade of the car early in the season as the team prepares for the three day Formula One test coming up mid March. It is believed that the team will trial different parts in this test. All of this is coming off the teams previous commitment not to just get through 2021 but to improve and achieve a better result than in 2020..

In an interview Williams Team Principal Simon Roberts spoke of the teams of the team.

Roberts said: “We are conscious of where we started from. It would be very easy to go one way or the other [2021 or 2022 car] but we want to continue to be competitive. We haven’t given up.

“We’ve got a dedicated team looking at the 43B, so we do plan on bringing upgrades to the track in the early part of the season.

“It’s certainly not ‘launch it, send it and forget about it’, it’s part of an evolution, a journey and we want to try to make some inroads into the gaps above us.

“But we also have to be realistic. We haven’t got the opportunity to suddenly jump a huge way up the grid, but we want to be competitive, racing at the back and we want to put some of the teams around us under pressure.

“I’m in the space now where I just want to get the car out there, get to Bahrain, see some lap times and really check it does what we think it will do.”

“Interestingly, we’ve got a few options that we’re taking to Bahrain to the test.

“It’s almost a first race upgrade, which is really really cool, I’m really excited about that.

“And we actually have got an upgrade plan through the year.

“But it’s going to be pretty modest and I expect like other teams we’ll be looking very carefully at how we put our resource on that.”

But like the rest of the teams Williams will have to shift their focus to the 2022 car but at this stage of the year the team has a team looking after the FW43B.

Roberts add: “As the season develops, the focus switches more and more on to the ’44 for ’22 and we’ve a big team working on that right now.”

“We already feel the 2022 car is rushing at us faster than you can imagine, but it is like that. It’s a balancing act but we are doing a good job.”

Pre-season testing begins in Bahrain on March 12, lasting only three days before the season opener at the same venue two weeks later.

In an interview with The Race.com Roberts commented that “you could take that one of two ways” when asked by The Race if his remark about a first race upgrade meant the team was ahead of where it expected to be in designing and producing parts: “Either ahead of schedule or we can’t make our mind up what we really want!”

“But yeah, we’ve got some options,” he added.

“So, we’re going with a range of parts that we’ll get on the car.

“It’s great, it’s a nice position to be in. Both drives will get to try both options and we’ve got enough parts around us to convert stock for the race.

“It could be a first race upgrade, which would be a nice place to be.”

As for the development of the cars each team is given two development tokens to spend on components, with big items like rear suspension costing two tokens and smaller items costing only one. Roberts disclosed that Williams spent one of its tokens last year on an undisclosed smaller item and as that only left it one more to spend, the team opted not to make further modifications to the FW43B.

Despite the lack of development Roberts did make it clear that the FW43B is substantially different to the FW43.

One thing the team have been able to achieve is in the weight of the car with the FW43B under the mandated weight limit, which means Williams is able to use ballast to aid weight distribution.

“We’ve taken the time and we’ve been around everything we can possibly touch to try and save weight,” Roberts said.

“We’ve rebalanced all the coolers on the car. We’ve re-optimised everything we could.

“And it’s not the normal kind of rush into it because we know the car, we’ve been racing it for 17 races last year, so we’ve got tonnes of data.

“It’s allowed the engineers to really go to a level that we don’t always get the chance to do.

“If you could literally take the skin off the car and have a look, it’s so neat, it’s so tidy underneath. And we’ve saved quite a bit of weight on it.

“The thing is easier to build, it goes together really nicely. Hopefully it’ll be more reliable, and that’s certainly the intent.

“All those little things you never quite get a chance to fix, we’ve been able to sort out.

“And the target is to find some more performance, be more reliable and start moving our way up.”