No more major technical signings - Claire Williams: “For us Simon is the final piece”
The arrival of Simon Roberts as new F1 Managing Director for Williams could overturn the fate of the British team which is struggling among the other teams on the grid.
Williams are looking to recover after two disappointing years in Formula 1 - finishing 10th in the Constructors' Championship - and this hope seems to lie in the arrival of the former McLaren Operations Director, Simon Roberts.
Simon Roberts spent nearly 17 years serving the McLaren team as Operations Director and Chief Operating Officer.
The British team is looking for new investments. They had already considered the F1 team's partial or full sale option if it was the best solution.
https://www.motorlat.com/notas/f1/15590/williams-plans-to-sell-its-formula-1-team
In addition, Williams' official sponsor - ROKiT - ended his contract in 2019 and the team suffered a loss of £13 million.
According to what the British team's deputy team principal, Claire Williams said that Simon Roberts could bring great help to the team.
Roberts has accumulated a lot of experience within McLaren and a brief experience in Force India.
"Simon is a fantastic addition to the team and we're really excited," Claire Williams said.
"He's obviously got a fantastic background and in his role will coordinate between technical and operations. That's the role that we're excited by, and we think Simon's going to do a really great job in.
"We have also strengthened our technical team, following a period of restructuring last year that we undertook. David Warner has come in as our chief designer and Jonathan Carter has come in from Renault as our deputy chief designer and head of design.” speaking about the changes that the team made in these past few years.
"We've been working very hard on the restructuring of our technical and operations groups, and for us Simon is the final piece of that work that we have been doing.
"So for us at the moment, the structure is as we have always wanted it to be. We're very happy with it and we're going to let it play its course and play out.
"We think it will do a good job, so there will are no plans right here, right now to be bringing any further people into our engineering side of the business."
Speaking of senior staff, Williams thinks they have the right one, although it is believed that more aid could help strengthen their number with the idea that track activity could improve.
"With Formula 1 teams you give them money to spend and they'll spend it straight away. You give it to engineers and they spend it even faster, and they want even more.
"[But we want] investment in order to ensure that we can compete successfully. So that obviously means investing in infrastructure.
"I don't necessarily believe that we need to invest in personnel at a senior level. I think that we've got [the right people for] that. Whether we need more people in the ranks below, that will be a question that we will look at. But we have plans. I don't want to go into detail on them but that's what the investment will be used for."