Williams might have to wait until the latter parts of the 2018 Formula One season to fully optimise the potential of its car, according to technical chief Paddy Lowe.
The FW41, Lowe's first car since joining from Mercedes at the start of last season, marks a radical departure from the team's previous concepts. Williams seemed to lack pace during F1's pre-season tests and spent the two weeks languishing at the bottom end of the timing screens.
However, Lowe is confident the team has a good package to work with.
"I think a large degree of change both in the team that delivered the car and the car itself, that can take a while to develop and optimise," Lowe said. "I think we can make a lot more progress within the season and even into next. It's still early in the potential I think that's in the team."
"The correlation is pretty sound. Actually Williams' ability to measure aerodynamic performance is one of the strongest I've seen. The technology and the people together is very strong. We've got a great wind tunnel, it's well up there with the best. So we've got good tools and we make good use of them but I think there's potential to do even more."
With Williams' new car looking erratic on track during pre-season in Barcelona, Lowe admits there is plenty of work to be done to extract its fully potential.
"We're doing a lot of experiments on that, the limitation in the car at the moment is corner entry instability. That's quite often the limitation in the car to be honest but it's particularly exaggerated at the moment with what we're running and if we can unlock some progress there we will find a lot more lap time than we've got at the moment because some other aspects of the car are working really, really strongly through other phases of the corner."