Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds says one of the team’s biggest areas of focus ahead of the new 2016 season has been on low-speed performance.
The Grove-based outfit struggled with the FW37 on high-downforce circuits like Monaco and Singapore in 2015, but thrived on track layouts with long straights.
Williams finished third in the constructors’ standings last year. Symonds is hoping the team can build on the result and push the development barrier back with the FW38, which was revealed early on Friday morning.
"The FW37 was a pretty effective car and so we concentrated on understanding the areas where we could improve it without losing the attributes which made it effective,” he said.
"It is no secret that the low speed performance of the FW37 didn’t match its high speed performance so a lot of time was spent looking into why this was and subsequently making changes, which we hope will improve the situation.
"On top of this we looked at the normal physical obstacles to development that one always meets during the life of a car and tried to push those barriers back."
Symonds said the first work on the FW38 started in mid-January 2015, before last year’s car had even hit the track, and confirmed there have been several "operational changes" at Williams for the new season.
He also expects the new exhaust regulations for 2016 to make the engine noise "sharper" and around "12% louder", also triggering "some of the dramatic sounds we all associate with high performance turbo charged engines" from time to time.
He added: "Over the last couple of years Williams has regained the competitive spirit it was so long famous for. I want to harness and augment that spirit and use it to drive us forward in a progressive manner while always keeping a strategic eye on the future and in particular the big changes due for 2017."
