Williams will persist with the rear wing that contributed to aerodynamic stalls during qualifying for last weekend’s Formula 1 British Grand Prix, calling the issue “a phenomenon”.
Williams introduced a new rear wing at Silverstone but Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin both spun off track in the early stages of Q1, the Canadian going off at Brooklands and his team-mate spinning through Stowe.
Williams pinpointed the instability on how the new rear wing is interacting with the floor upon the deactivation of DRS, and reverted to an old specification rear wing for the race.
Chief Technical Officer Paddy Lowe says there is ‘nothing fundamentally wrong’ with the new rear wing, and says the team will persist with the updated design at future events.
“We put some new parts on the car and we did our normal evaluations to check we had all the stability we need on such parts,” said Lowe.
“We adopted those parts and made some other adjustments, such as cooling, [changed] what we call Friday floors to race floors, which are a little bit lighter, then we found this problem that was intermittent but really quite catastrophic as you saw with the cars in qualifying.
“On one car it happened on one DRS zone and on the other the other, so they were each fine on the other DRS zone so it’s intermittent like that.
“It’s such an extreme loss of downforce that it’s not really safe, of course we could [have] considered racing without using DRS but that’s not a way to compete.
“We didn’t really know the exact cause so the best thing to do was to go back to a known combination of parts to run for the race which we did and we had no problems in the race
“I’m sure there’s a way through this that we still need to understand, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with this rear wing.”
Lowe added that he believes the problem was caused by “something in the way everything’s been put together, a combination that’s causing some strange phenomenon.
“I don’t have the answer, we need to do some more evaluations.”
The issue was the latest setback in a difficult campaign for the team, which occupies last position in the Constructors' Championship, 12 points adrift of Sauber.
