Williams to revert to 2012 exhaust

Williams may be forced to revert to last year's exhaust design in a bid to overcome the problems it is facing getting its Coanda concept to work.

"I think at the moment we are of the opinion that a FW34 type of car would be faster," said technical director Mike Coughlan, after seeing Pastor Maldonado fail to make it out of Q2 and Valtteri Bottas eliminated in Q1 in Malaysia.

"I don't we will go back to a FW34, but we might go back to a FW34-style exhaust system, and then treat Fridays as tests across cars. That is relatively easy for us.

"We will go back [to the factory] on Tuesday and have a complete rethink. Have we got too much to learn in a short time?"

"We see enough pointers here and in the wind tunnel that if we can fix something we will open up a great deal of potential," he said.

"We think fundamentally we have car to be in lower reaches of top 10. Here we were close but ultimately fell short, so we have some major things to fix and then we need to unharness the potential."