F1
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Paddy Lowe: Williams won't give up on fourth

Formula 1

Williams chief technical officer Paddy Lowe says his team remains determined to stay in the hunt for fourth place in the constructors' championship, despite trailing Force India by 60 points.

The team is currently fifth in the constructors' standings after a tough first half of the 2017 season, though it has managed to score one podium finish thanks to Lance Stroll's impressive drive to third in Baku. Force India has been the more consistent team so far this season and has only failed to score points on one occasion in Monaco -- a race in which Williams managed just two points.

When asked if he feels fourth is no longer an achievable target for Williams, Lowe replied: "No we won't give up on that. I think we can be very strong at some other races this year, hopefully some of the ones coming up, and we'll aim to get better at exploiting the performance with points which we've also not been great at doing in the first half.

"First half term report is we 'could do better' -- could do a lot better. We'll go back to the second half with that mentality of trying to do that. I just said to the guys that's a good weekend to motivate us to make a quicker car. I think that's the best way to sum it up really. We've got a lot of work to do and we need to be better than that. And we can be better than that, so that's what we'll go away and do.

"There's a pretty clear pattern," he added. "We're not performing as we should at what you would call the max downforce circuits. Those are Monaco, Hungary and Singapore. But I'm never one to give up before I've got there. So we'll see what we can do before Singapore."

Williams tried out some "significant" changes to its FW40 during last week's post-Hungarian Grand Prix test as the Grove-based team analysed new ways to try and lift its game in the search for improvements. Though Lowe refused to be drawn on the specifics of the changes, he confirmed essential work had been completed.

"There are some fairly significant bits that we're trying," he explained. "We're doing some interesting bits of R&D. Some are relevant for this year, but some are things we need to learn and understand for next year. There's some important work going on, actually. It's a set of experiments, that's the best way to put it, which is how we always conduct our testing. Where that leaves us in terms of what we take racing is a downstream consideration."

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