Formula 1: Will 2020 be a scoreless year for Williams?
By Asher Fair
Williams, by far the slowest team on the Formula 1 grid in the last two seasons, managed to score one point in 2019. Will they go scoreless in 2020?
One point.
That is all Williams managed to score throughout the 21-race 2019 Formula 1 season, and with all things considered, they didn’t even do it on the track.
Even more disappointing is the fact that it may be all they need in 2020 to consider 2020 a success.
The loss of several long-time sponsors has led to rumors that Williams could potentially end up leaving Formula 1 due to a lack of funding sooner rather than later, and the fact that they have performed at such a low level has only added to that speculation.
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The 2019 season was an absolutely disaster — by far the worst in team history, dating back to their debut in 1977 when they didn’t even compete in every race on the schedule, and there is not a huge reason to believe that the 2020 season will be a whole lot better despite optimism in preseason testing.
The recent run of flat-out awful performance began as a gradual decline for the nine-time constructor champions, as the Grove-based team had recorded podium finishes every year from 2014 to 2017 after a stretch of several below-average seasons.
But third place finishes in the constructor standings in the 2014 and 2015 seasons turned into fifth place finishes in the standings in the 2016 and 2017 seasons, and they still finished the 2017 season having scored points in the last nine and 14 of the last 15 races.
However, to this day, Felipe Massa’s seventh place finish in the penultimate race of the 2017 season remains their most recent top seven result.
Williams sank to the bottom of the constructor standings in 10th place with just seven points on three top 10 finishes in the 2018 season, and just when you thought they couldn’t sink any lower, they hit rock bottom in 2019.
But even that “rock bottom” — one point — may be better than they do in 2020.
Robert Kubica scored the team’s lone point in the 2019 season, an irony in and of itself considering the fact that rookie teammate George Russell actually got the absolute most out of the FW42 throughout the season, pulling off the rare feat of outqualifying Kubica in each of the 21 races on the schedule.
And that “one point” was gifted to him on a technicality.
The wet/dry German Grand Prix was one of the craziest Formula 1 races in recent memory, and it featured seven drivers crashing out or being forced to retire for other reasons.
Unsurprisingly, the Williams pair rounded out the order among those who finished the race in 12th and 13th place, with Kubica finishing ahead of Russell for just the second time in 11 races.
But after the race, Alfa Romeo Racing teammates Kimi Raikkonen and rookie Antonio Giovinazzi, who finished in seventh and eighth place, respectively, were each penalized 30 seconds due to a violation that they both committed at the start of the race.
So Kubica finished in 10th place by default, scoring one point.
Could that happen again in 2020? Sure. Anything is possible. When you think about the strategy involved in this particular race, Russell actually very well could have finished in the top five had the team taken his word for the race conditions.
But know that it could literally take nine non-Williams drivers to wreck, be disqualified or be forced to retire due to mechanical issues for that to happen.
It even took them until the 2019 season’s sixth race for one of their two drivers to actually finish (excluding retirements) a race ahead of a non-Williams driver in the running order.
There was one bright spot to their year last year, however. They were the final team to experience their first retirement, as it took until the season’s 15th race in Singapore for that to happen when Russell crashed out.
But even that isn’t much of a bright spot, as in that regard, everything went their way, yet they still couldn’t get the job done.
In 2020, Russell is set to return to the team, and despite the fact that he was the lone scoreless driver in the 2019 season, he clearly gives them their best chance to score points.
Aside of his 11th place finish in the German Grand Prix, he did finish in a solid 12th in the Brazilian Grand Prix; Kubica was 16th. In addition to his qualifying whitewash, he finished ahead of Kubica in all but three races in 2019.
Kubica, however, is out and is set to be replaced by Nicholas Latifi. While that may or may not be an upgrade, it will be hard for Latifi to do much worse compared to Russell than Kubica did. With that being said, Kubica finished no higher than 15th outside of Germany, so even an improvement may come a few positions shy of finishing in 10th and scoring a point.
Will Williams find more success in the 2020 Formula 1 season than they did in their horrific 2019 campaign, or will they perhaps do worse and go scoreless for the first time since they began competing full-time in 1978? As disappointing as it is, the latter appears more likely. Then again, it appeared more likely in 2019 as well, so one can remain optimistic — if there is such a thing, in this case.