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Williams not giving up on catching Force India – Lowe

Paddy Lowe says Williams will not give up on his charge for fourth place in the Formula 1 world constructors' championship and has confidence his team can still reel in Force India after the summer break.

Williams lost ground on Force India in the Hungarian Grand Prix after a double points failure, coupled with Felipe Massa's late withdrawal from the race weekend due to an inner ear infection, and now trails Force India by 60 points in the F1 world constructors' standings.

Lowe remains resolute in Williams' focus on fourth in the F1 world championship and the recent poor performances will act as timely motivation over the summer break for the whole team to step up the development of the FW40.

"I've said to the guys that Hungary is a good weekend to motivate us to make a quicker car," Lowe said. "I think that's the best way to sum it up really. We've got a lot of work to do and we need to be better than that. And we can be better than that, so that's what we'll go away and do.

"We won't give up on P4. I think we can be very strong at some other races this year, hopefully some of the ones coming up, and we'll aim to get better at exploiting the performance with points which we've also not been great at doing in the first half. First half term report is ‘could do better', could do a lot better. We'll go back to the second half with that mentality of trying to do that."

Lowe also feels the run of tracks which hold the final nine races of the 2017 calendar should play to the strengths of Williams, with only Singapore highlighted as a weak track for the British squad due to the demand of high downforce - something the Williams technical chief is focused on changing.

"We're not performing as we should at the what you would call the maximum downforce circuits," he said. "Those are Monaco, Hungary and Singapore. But I'm never one to give up before I've got there. So we'll see what we can do before Singapore."

Zdroj: crash.net