‘Someone will buy Williams so their son can race’

Michelle Foster
Williams blurred

Williams blurred

Juan Pablo Montoya believes poor decision making from Williams’ hierachy has led to the team’s demise but hopes someone will save the beleaguered outfit.

Last season Williams finished bottom of the log for the second year running.

It was perhaps the final straw in the once-championship winning team’s fall from grace.

Despite seven World titles and nine Constructors’ crowns, Williams has fallen on hard times and last month announced the sale of its Formula 1 team.

The statement said that ‘whilst no decisions have been made regarding the optimal outcome yet, to facilitate discussions with interested parties, the Company announces the commencement of a ‘formal sale process’.’

Montoya feels Williams has only itself to blame.

According to the Colombian, winner of four grand prizes with Williams, the team’s hierachy has made bad decision when it comes to hiring staff, such as the arrival of Paddy Lowe in 2017.

It wasn’t that Lowe joined the team that was the issue, rather he wasn’t utilised to his strengths.

“In my opinion, there are people who are very good at certain things,” the former F1 driver explained to Motorsport.com.

“It is like saying ‘you are very good as a journalist, but that you are a good journalist does not necessarily mean that you are good at managing a channel or a newspaper, because you are good at reporting, not necessarily driving journalists.

“So when you get a person who is good at certain things to do others, not what they are good at, it doesn’t help.

“And I think that was one of the big problems that Williams had, that in despair they started hiring people, they believed that it was the solution and they did not take advantage of what people were good at, but instead made them manage others.”

Williams is hoping to have the team’s future resolved in the coming months with F1 sporting boss Ross Brawn revealing there are “serious” contenders to buy the team.

Montoya, rather cynically, reckons it could go to a rich man wanting a race seat for his son.

“Hopefully they survive,” he said. “Probably someone is going to put money there and end up putting their son there, as happens many times.”

Williams, though, is not the first Formula 1 team to fall from grace.

“If you look for example at what happened with Tyrrell, who was an incredible team for many years and when it went wrong, it went very wrong until it was over,” Montoya added. “And it was a team that won everything”

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