{"id":18961,"date":"2013-08-06T07:18:50","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T11:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/?p=18961"},"modified":"2013-08-06T07:18:50","modified_gmt":"2013-08-06T11:18:50","slug":"any-change-good-for-struggling-williams-maldonado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/formula-1\/any-change-good-for-struggling-williams-maldonado\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Any change’ good for struggling Williams – Maldonado"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pastor Maldonado insists the arrival at Williams of Pat Symonds, and the departure of Mike Coughlan, must be good for the beleaguered British team.<\/p>\n

\"Pastor-Maldonado-3\"2012 appeared to be a turnaround in fortunes for Williams, when Venezuelan Maldonado won the Spanish grand prix.<\/p>\n

But the slump returned with a vengeance in 2013, and after the first half of the season only a solitary point separates Williams from the backmarkers Marussia and Caterham.<\/p>\n

So, mid last month, Williams announced that Pat Symonds – formerly of the title-winning Benetton and Renault team until the ‘crashgate’ scandal – is switching from Marussia.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Williams’ technical director Coughlan ‘stepped down’.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I think we need some change,” said Maldonado.<\/p>\n

“The way we’ve been working, trying to improve our performance, was not the best and for sure any change in a good way is very welcome.”<\/p>\n

Teammate Valtteri Bottas agrees that Williams needs “some new ideas and new opinions”.<\/p>\n

Maldonado bluntly told Brazil’s Totalrace: “It is practically impossible for us to be worse than how we have been this year.<\/p>\n

“Any change is welcome,” he added.\u00a0 “If it will solve the problem, we don’t know.<\/p>\n

“What I do know is that we work hard, but the way we have been working did not work.\u00a0 Now we have to change something in the team.”<\/p>\n

However, he refuses to say Coughlan, the former McLaren chief designer who initially left F1 at the centre of the ‘spygate’ scandal, is the reason for Williams’ troubles.<\/p>\n

“We cannot speak about one person; we are 500 employees, and I include myself,” said Maldonado.<\/p>\n

“We did not do things the right way and so we did not get the results.”<\/p>\n

Most worrying, the 28-year-old driver admitted, is that Williams is baffled as to why its performance crashed so badly over the winter period.<\/p>\n

“We don’t know why, and this is one of the most serious problems we have,” said Maldonado.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pastor Maldonado insists the arrival at Williams of Pat Symonds, and the departure of Mike Coughlan, must be good for the beleaguered British team. 2012 appeared to be a turnaround in fortunes for Williams, when Venezuelan Maldonado won the Spanish grand prix. But the slump returned with a vengeance in 2013, and after the first …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,5340,585,1842,276,538,595],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18962,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961\/revisions\/18962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}