Williams head of vehicle performance Rob Smedley has offered some insight into his team's poor qualifying performance in Monaco.

Williams qualified 14th and 17th - although both drivers will move forward on the grid due to penalties further up - which is by far its worst performance of the year. Smedley said Williams was expecting more from the FW37 at Monaco.

"In low-speed corners we know that we have a deficit that we are working on. Coming here we didn't think it was going to be our best circuit, but we thought it would be better than it has been. There is a simple fact that we are not just generating enough grip in the tyres. We put the tyres almost certainly in the right working range in terms of temperatures, and we have been through various different temperature ranges to see if it's brought us any more performance, but it hasn't really changed anything.

"Whether or not we are generating enough indentation in the tyre is something we are going to have to go away and understand. Tomorrow when we put more fuel in it might tell us something, but it was a similar situation we had here last year and it's not an easy problem to solve. The good news is that it's one race in 19."

The team struggled at Monaco last year and Smedley said it had tried everything this year to get the tyres working but to no avail.

"We know we've got understeer and we've been working to get rid of the understeer, but when you are not generating actual mechanical grip from the tyres then it masks everything - you are putting a tiny sticking plaster on it," he said. "With the amount of grip that we have got, we have got the cars reasonably well balanced and they [the drivers] are not complaining of anything major. It's not in the car set-up per se, it's more in the way we are generating the mechanical grip in the tyre.

"The situation is exaggerated from the point of view that you have very low circuit roughness here, no high-speed corners, no straights within which you have load on the car, so it's a bit of a vicious circle. You have certain car characteristics, and to get out of it [what we need] with the tools that we have available here at the track is quite difficult.

"I've spoken in the past that we need to get on top of the tyre management here in the track when the tools are available and we haven't explored them enough, but I'm quite happy on this occasion to say we have done a reasonable amount of due diligence and there is nothing glaring there to make me sit at the end of qualifying saying, 'We should have done this, we didn't explore that or we didn't consider this'. In fact, in terms of what you can actually do here to generate grip, we've done a reasonable amount."