For a team that went from third-best to being in danger of falling to 5th in the Constructor standings, Williams know they need to bounce back next season when radical new rules will come into effect.

Team technical director Pat Symonds went on record during a recent interview saying that his team switched their focus to the 2017 season “a while back” and that the current car will only receive a couple of upgrades before the end of the year.

“There are still people working on the current car; we still have upgrades that we will bring. We have a new floor that we are bringing to Hungary, a new wing in Monza – so there are still plenty of things coming. But sure, the majority of our people are working on next year’s car.”

When asked when exactly this major shift of manpower and resources happened, Symonds stated that “it doesn’t happen on a fixed date – it is more that as each project on the current car comes to an end, that person then switches to next year. The point at which we’ve had more people working on the 2017 car than the 2016 car probably occurred in early June – something like that. I am not sure exactly as we don’t make headcounts on that, but early June is my estimation.”

One of the major issues with this season has been the FW38 performing way below expectations. In fact, Williams are much more likely to be caught by Force India by the end of the year, than to get anywhere near Red Bull or Ferrari, who are fighting for second-place in the standings. Right now, Williams’ lead over Force India is 19 points, while the deficit they would have to overcome in order to reach Red Bull would be 106 points.

So what exactly happened this year? Symonds think his team were a bit blindsided by how much everybody improved over the winter.

“I think that most of our competitors improved more than we expected. We made the improvements that we more or less had expected to make. We probably didn’t set the targets high enough. Some of our competitors have improved a lot. But a huge factor also was that the power units got much more equal – and that is eroding some of the advantage that we had.”

As for next year and what he expects to see, the Williams exec believes that Mercedes’ power supremacy will decrease and that drivers will love having a lot more downforce thanks to the new regulations. Also, if Pirelli manages to make new tires that allow drivers to push harder and for longer periods of time, certain strategic elements such as the famous ‘undercut’ could be reduced drastically as some races will go from two-stops to one stop and three-stops to two-stops.

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