Williams has gone from bad to worse in Bahrain, leaving the team confounded by its poor qualifying pace and its drivers lingering at the tail end of the field.
Sergey Sirotkin and Lance Stroll will line up P18 and P20 respectively on Sunday's grid, the Williams FW41 running over three seconds adrift from poleman Sebastian Vettel on Saturday, with lap times that were even slower than the outfit's 2017 performance!
Williams tech boss Paddy Lowe offered no specific reason for the Grove-based squad's depressed state of affairs in the Bahrain desert.
"That’s not where we want to be starting the race but we weren’t quick enough today for a number of reasons, some of them we understand, some of them we don’t," said Lowe.
"We need to go away and do some more work."
Sirotkin outqualified his team mate but that was no consolation for the Russian rookie who believes Williams "is missing something". Still, he appeared surprisingly content with his car's performance, if not with the achieved result.
"I think, compared to Melbourne, we actually did a better job," he said.
"In some terms we maximised the performance of the car. We are moving ahead in one area, but we are missing something.
"I’m happy because we’re moving ahead and we are not making the same mistakes as we were in Melbourne.
"We didn’t see it in the results, but for sure the way we are working is better and personally I’m happy with that."
Stroll was far less complacent about Williams' pace given the fact that his qualifying performance was just an extension of the difficulties that started on Friday morning.
"It has been a really hard weekend," said the Canadian Saturday evening.
"It was disappointing for the team with both cars out in Q1 and it was not ideal.
"A lot of things are wrong. The balance isn’t there, the grip is not high enough and we need more speed, so we need everything to go quicker.
"Last year in qualifying, my lap was four tenths better than it was today. In the race, I hope we can go forward, but we don’t have the package today to compete where we want to compete."
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