Williams needs to continue developing the FW37 from "back to front" if it is to keep pace with Ferrari and Mercedes, according to head of performance engineering Rob Smedley.

Williams finished over a minute behind Sebastian Vettel in Malaysia as the German claimed an unexpected victory. The Grove outfit had hoped to close in on Mercedes this season but saw itself fall behind Ferrari in the Malaysia pecking order in both qualifying and the race.

When asked if his former team's new-found form was a worry, Smedley replied: "Yeah, of course I'm concerned. To be 60 seconds down at the end of the race, absolutely it's a concern. It would be remiss of me to say I wasn't concerned about that. But there are certain bits of it, like the fact that Sebastian could do one less stop than us has certainly helped in that minute, so that's where we need to start concentrating.

"At the same time we need to develop the car package from front to back, you need to keep pushing on with that. It's a concern - if anyone is in front it's a concern, no matter what colour their car is. We just have to keep pushing on and make sure we're developing at a faster rate than them. If we do that, we close a gap, it's that simple."

"To be 60 seconds down at the end of the race, absolutely it's a concern. It would be remiss of me to say I wasn't concerned about that." Williams head of performance engineering, Rob Smedley

Though Vettel was able to complete one fewer pit stop than his Mercedes and Williams rivals Smedley does not think tyres are the only issue holding the team back.

"It's a combination of a lot of things. I think that's probably part and parcel of what we need to do now, look at the tyre management here. There's a car package pace deficit and it's not as if we should shy away from that. There is car package pace deficit from both MGP [Mercedes] and Ferrari and we have to work hard to improve that. At the same time, concurrently, we need to look at our tyre management and how we manage the tyres.

"Why were there cars in the race that could do one less stop than us? That's a really key point. It's not that we look at it afterwards and say 'ah, we could have done one less stop'. We couldn't. So they key factor here is we need to understand as a group of people that there's work to do in that area. It's like everything, you've got a deficit, you've got a deficit in all areas - you don't have this Eureka moment where you unlock half a second or a second from the car. We just need to do our due diligence and we'll do it right and find the right answers."