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The Williams Formula 1 team's downturn in competitiveness in the Hungarian Grand Prix should be taken as a one-off, says the Grove squad's performance chief Rob Smedley.

Williams has generally had the second fastest car on the grid in recent races, but it slipped back behind Ferrari and Red Bull at the Hungaroring and also lost third spot in the constructors' championship to the Italian outfit.

Smedley believes Williams did better than expected on a circuit that did not suit the FW36, and he expects the team will be back to its best once racing resumes at Spa at the end of August.

"Our target is to be second in the championship and that's still achievable," Smedley said.

"I think we had a race that was a little bit anomalous if you look at our results over the last five races.

"We've got two races [Spa and Monza] coming up where we've got to capitalise on the characteristics of the car.

"We think those circuits will suit us. We have to capitalise on that and put ourselves in a good position."

Smedley started work with Williams in April, following a period of gardening leave from his former team Ferrari, and he reckons Williams has now evolved to the point where it can keep pace with bigger outfits in the car development race.

"Development speed and testing methodology has improved and allowed us to keep pace with the others, or even get ahead of them at times," Smedley added.

"At the track, testing and racing, we're making steady progress.

"There are big areas we've looked into and we have a certain evolving structure we're improving all the time.

"Certain things you want on the car have a long lead time and you can't have them at the next race, or even until the next year.

"Some of it with the operations group you can solve in 10 minutes and some of it you need a lot longer.

"It's a constant juggling act."

CULTURAL SHIFT

Valtteri Bottas started third for the Hungarian GP, but he only finished eighth after a slow first pitstop and a questionable call on tyre strategy.

Smedley said the culture of self-improvement instilled in Williams meant it would bounce back from its mistakes for future races.

"I reckon we're 60 per cent of where we need to be in terms of operations, so it's not just when everything goes horribly wrong that I turn around and say we need to sharpen up operations," Smedley said.

"We need to sharpen up operations full-stop.

"The important thing for Williams now, perhaps a slight change of culture, is that we'll go away, try to understand all the things we did, understand what we did well, see what we didn't do so well, and improve.

"Every single race we learn something and we get better.

"Even when we're first and second by a margin we won't stop trying to improve."