Last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix signified the end of Formula 1’s pre-season ‘phoney war’ as the teams which had been masking their performance dropped all pretences and the real competitive pecking order emerged.
Williams was not one of those outfits so its humble result was disappointing rather than genuinely surprising. The team has been behind the curve ever since it had to abort its presence at the Barcelona shakedown, ahead of which stories emerged that the car had failed its crash test and was 20kg or more overweight.
