Williams season review

Overall Williams was more consistently competitive and a bigger threat to the leaders in 2009 than it had been for several years - but that improvement barely registered in the championship standings.

In ITV.com/f1's latest season review, we look back at how Williams impressed but didn't quite deliver this season.


Sir Frank Williams was delighted to learn that other teams were planning to protest his squad and its fellow double diffuser runners over the winter.

As the legendary team boss pointed out, the likes of McLaren and Ferrari wouldn't be getting wound up about Williams's pace if they didn't think the car was a threat.

And as Williams took a clean sweep of fastest practice times - including a Friday morning one-two - in Melbourne, it looked like the usual front-runners were right to be worried.

Indeed if points were awarded for practice rather than races, Nico Rosberg would've been a runaway world champion, leading at least one session every weekend in the first half of the season, before Williams toned down its aggressive practice strategies.

But somehow all that promise failed to translate into actual results.

Williams ended the year only seventh in the constructors' standings, just one spot better than in 2008, and couldn't repeat the previous year's podiums.

The team was in better overall shape than for several years, but its car lacked the final burst of pace to threaten for wins - and its best opportunities slipped away through misfortune or underperformance.

The double diffuser advantage proved shortlived, and costly slumps in the two races where Williams was arguably at its best raised questions over Rosberg's ability to deliver.

The German was in the mix for a podium in Australia but lost more time than most on the fragile soft tyres and tumbled to sixth.

He burst into the lead off the line in Malaysia, but fell back when it rained and scored just half a point.

Once everyone had joined the double diffuser bandwagon, Williams settled into a position nearer the sharp end than the midfield.

It avoided its usual mid-season slide and was one of the most consistent teams in a crazily topsy-turvy year, albeit consistently just behind the top contenders rather than threatening them.

That still meant a string of eight straight points finishes from Spain to Belgium, and 15 top ten starts for Rosberg in 17 rounds.




A brief early summer resurgence saw Rosberg come close to podiums in Britain and Hungary, and brilliantly surge from 15th to fourth on home ground.

His humble eighth in Belgium was possibly his best drive of the year though, for Williams - still at a budget and resources disadvantage compared to many rivals - had decided not to focus on its low-drag package and was consequently well off the pace at Spa and Monza.

By then it was clear that Rosberg was heading elsewhere for 2009, but there were still two big opportunities for the partnership to end on a high.

Having qualified a brilliant third in Singapore, Rosberg was hot on winner Lewis Hamilton's heels in second place when he outbraked himself in the pit exit and slid over the white line marking the pit lane.

It was a momentary error that actually slowed him down, but it still resulted in a drivethrough penalty that had to be taken just after a safety car had bunched the field up, ruining his afternoon.

Rosberg was outstanding in the wet in Brazil and looked a dead cert for pole until qualifying was stopped to allow conditions to improve.

Even after this he was in line for a podium in the race had his gearbox not failed.

Despite the occasional - and often very costly - wobbly moments, Rosberg had his most consistently competitive F1 season yet, and underlined this with a career-best seventh place in the championship.

He let some opportunities slip from his grasp, but he also delivered points on days when others wouldn't - as team-mate Kazuki Nakajima's awful year demonstrated.

Rather than building on his quietly promising rookie season, Nakajima was all but invisible in 2009.

He couldn't step his pace up when it mattered in qualifying so invariably started in the midfield and made little progress.

And when he did deliver on a Saturday - taking a career-high fifth on the grid at Silverstone - he was not fast enough around the pit stops to hold off the heavier cars and fell right back to 11th.

It might have been different had he not crashed in Melbourne having impressively come through from 11th to fourth on a heavy fuel load, an error Nakajima was still kicking himself for at the end of the year, and which cost him momentum before his season had got going.

His tribulations made Williams virtually a one-car team, as Rosberg scored all 34.5 of its points.

With two drivers delivering on Rosberg's level, Williams would have been at least one, maybe two, places higher up the standings this year.

But having proved it can stand its ground in the top ten for a full year again, with cost-cutting measures bringing the big spenders back into its range, and with a handy mix of experience and raw potential in next year's driver line-up of veteran Rubens Barrichello and GP2 champion Nico Hulkenberg, Williams should feel optimistic heading into 2010.

Highlight: Starting the season as a real thorn in the leaders' side again.

Lowlight: Losing a certain podium in Singapore for such a tiny error.