24/08/2013
NEWS STORY
Mat Coch writes:
It may be facing its toughest season on record but Williams still has all the necessary ingredients to be successful according to its new Technical Director, Pat Symonds.
The 60-year-old F1 veteran joined Williams during the summer break, the Belgian Grand Prix marking his first race weekend for his new employer. His appointment comes at a critical time for Williams and follows a string of Technical Director changes in the last two years which have including Sam Michael, Mark Gillan and Mike Coughlan.
However, despite the constant changes Symonds believes Williams has the raw ingredients to be successful and that an upturn in fortunes could be just around the corner.
"It's a very well equipped team. It has some very good people in it," he told reporters in Belgium. "I've been there four days, so it's very much first impressions, but those first impressions are that it's a team with fabulous facilities, it's a great factory, there's most of the equipment that we need there and a lot of very good people.
"A lot of those people I have known for many years and worked with many of them so there is a lot of quality."
Symonds appears to see his new role as more managerial than technical, and he already has ideas of what needs to be done to make Williams successful once more.
"A lot of what I'm trying to do with Williams is still a bit of a process rather than the detail and that process can have an effect reasonably quickly.
"An analogy I often use is it's like being the conductor of an orchestra," he continued. "I think we have some very good instrumentalists in our orchestra. Now we just really need to get them timed together, playing the same tune and bring the success back."
Symonds joined the Grove-based squad from Marussia where he'd worked as a consultant, his first role in Formula One after paying his dues for the Singapore scandal of 2008. Symonds had previously engineered Michael Schumacher at Benetton before following the German to Ferrari in the mid 1990's where he was part of the Italian squad's 'dream team'.
To date Williams has scored just a single point in 2013, coming courtesy of Pastor Maldonado at the Hungarian Grand Prix, and currently finds itself ninth in the championship standings, six points adrift of the similarly struggling Sauber team.