Lowe: What we have done has not been good enough

Lowe, recruited from Mercedes last year, was expected to galvanise the team, while the addition of highly rated former Ferrari-designer Dirk de Beer to their technical department, but their first car - the FW41 - has been a lemon with both their young drivers Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin struggling.

Reviewing the first three race, Lowe said, "I wouldn't say that there has been a lot of depression because that is not the way to dig yourself out of a situation. It is about going away, analyzing and understanding where you are. Then understanding what you have to do. And focusing the organization around that."

"Which is exactly what we are doing because we are not where we hoped to be and intend to be in terms of competition, but it is of our own making."

Stroll has made it clear that this year's car is a handful to drive relative to the car he drove last season with reasonable success, while rookie Sirotkin said he felt like "an idiot" as he too battled to find the sweet spot.

Lowe conceded, "Clearly what we have done has not been good enough. We made some small parts of that plan already deployed [in China] in terms of tests and evaluations of stuff we did, which gave us a lot of information, a lot of data, and including some improvements."

"So it may be not all that noticeable, but there is some small progress in the car that we were running in qualifying."

According to Lowe, Shanghai offered a sliver of hope to the beleaguered team, "Based on P3 performance, there was some hope we might get at least one of the cars into Q2. We narrowly missed that."

"There is a sense of optimism already that we can make solid progress and rapid progress. We have already started down that road. I couldn't put a time frame on that. It is all work in progress."

"It is a wide statement but we are absolutely not content with our current position within this season, so we want to make some substantial progress within this season, indeed within this first half-season," insisted Lowe.

Williams now head to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix where last year Stroll took advantage of a chaotic race to claim his first podium against the odds.