Williams Racing has described the forthcoming 2023 F1 season as a building phase as the team looks to improve its fortunes.

The squad finished 10th and last in the constructors’ championship last year with just eight points to its name.

That contrasted with the 23 points it amassed in 2021, including a podium at the abridged Belgian “Grand Prix”.

Since the final race of last year, Jost Capito and FX Demaison departed from their roles as Team Principal and Technical Director respectively.

The highly-rated James Vowles has been recruited from Mercedes to head the operation going forward. He starts on February 20.

No quick fix for Williams F1 fortunes

It is not expected, however, that Williams’ fortunes will immediately reverse.

“Our objective for this year, which I think James will talk more about when he arrives in a couple of weeks’ time, but we’re about building the foundation now,” said Dave Robson, the team’s Head of Vehicle Performance.

“We’ve got a lot of small things behind the scenes to get in place and then, in future, we’ll see that the car performance will improve.

“(At the) Same time, we’ve got Logan (Sargeant) and Alex (Albon) to work on and generally get ourselves moving forward for the few years ahead.”

He added: “But we’ve got some objectives. Obviously, we had to set some objectives in terms of what we needed from the car.

“We’re seeing those come to fruition in all the simulations and, from there, we’ll see how everyone else has reacted and go from there.”

Robson has previously stated that this year’s car is more about evolution than revolution.

Williams launched its new car, the FW45, on February 6, though that proved to be little more than a livery reveal.

The car will hit the track for a shakedown on Monday before it and the team jets to Bahrain for pre-season testing on February 23-25.