The race is on, and Williams has at least won its first race of the season, as not only is its car ready for testing unlike last year, but it has also completed a promotional day by way of a shape-down in Barcelona.

But is the new FW43 really the car to turn around the team's fortunes?

I'm Ed Straw and joining me today to answer that question is Glenn Freeman,

with Gary Anderson also joining us later on to tell us what caught his eye about the new car.

Glenn, it's a sign of how far Williams has fallen and how deep in the wilderness this

team is that now we're talking about whether a team can even get above 10th place in the

constructors. It's absolutely amazing it's for, isn't that? Yeah, I'm not sure if we really are

talking about if they can get above 10th. I think everyone's expecting them to be 10th. The

sad thing for me is that, you know,

it was almost a cause for celebration, even amongst those of us who have a slightly more

detached from Williams, but still have a soft spot for them. It was an achievement that the

car was running a couple of days before testing. And that in itself is a bit sad for me because

plenty of other teams are doing that

and it just we're now benchmarking Williams against how bad they were last year and that goes

for pre-season where the car didn't run until you know testing was well underway and i think it'll

be the same on track as well where they're going to be at the back but it's almost going to be just considered a success if they're slightly closer to the rest of the field than they were last year. Well, there's a question of how far they'd fall. And as you said, the car, it was just a bit of a shambles last year. The car wasn't ready until, I think it was the third day of testing. It ran all sorts of trouble there. And, you know,

this question about whether it can get in amongst the midfield, even just to get with the midfield

compared to last year is a big step. Because they were, on average outright pace, they were

2% behind the 9th fastest team on average. That's a bigger gap between 9th and 10th than between

3rd and 4th. And we talk about 3rd and 4th as a chasm.

And that gap was about 1%. Between Williams and 9th place was 2% in terms of relative pace. So that tells you just how far this team has to go.

We knew that the new car wasn't going to be a revolution. We knew it was kind of a follow-on from last

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