Williams F1 wants to fight for victories against Mercedes in 2015

The success of the Mercedes AMG F1 team in /f1/actualite/19257-horner-red-bull-veut-donner-du-fil-a-retordre-a-mercedes-en-2015.html has inspired others, primarily its best customer team this year: Williams F1. The Grove-based team often appeared to be the second strongest in the championship, but ultimately finished third—significantly outpaced by the Red Bull team in the constructors’ championship.

The British team hopes to do better in 2015 and challenge Mercedes more often – a goal similar to that of the Red Bull team – as Claire Williams stated after a year that saw Felipe Massa being the only non-Mercedes driver to snatch a pole position, in Austria.

« I think it’s very clear where we want to be next year, and that’s to win races. The engineering guys and the rest of the factory know the work they have to do to achieve that. I think we’ve shown that we’ve closed the gap on Mercedes in the second half of the season, so I don’t see why we couldn’t reduce it further, » said the team director as quoted by Crash.net.

However, nothing is guaranteed for the team that moved from 9th to 3rd place within a year because its rivals are also working hard: « But everything depends on what our rivals do. We don’t know where Ferrari will be, we don’t know where Red Bull will be, we don’t know what will happen with the engine regulations… So all of that is up in the air right now, but it’s part of the passion of Formula 1. »

If the Williams F1 team aims high, it is also a target for other private teams, primarily Force India, as Silverstone team director Andrew Green told Autosport: I’d like to think we can take a new step to close the gap, given that we know if we can solve the deficit we have with the car’s behavior, there is significant time to gain. Hopefully, we can do that and at least fight with Williams. That’s really where we should be, and I think we can do it with everything we’ve set up for next year, and wind tunnel testing. Mercedes is also doing good work with the engine this winter.

Wind tunnel tests mentioned by Green are those to be conducted at Toyota’s facilities in Germany as announced earlier this month. The goal is to start the 2015 season as well as that of last year, which notably saw Perez secure a podium in Bahrain during the third race: « We are really excited about what we are bringing for next year and what we have learned about next year’s car. I think we should be back where we were at the start of the season. »