The Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend has been a horror show for the beleaguered Williams team so far.

First it had to replace George Russell’s chassis when his original car was smashed by a broken drain cover. Then Robert Kubica pranged his car in the first stage of qualifying. For the fourth time in as many races, neither driver made it to Q2.

Baku was one of the few bright points for the team in 2018. Last year it got both its cars into Q2 and scored a rare points finish in the race.

But 12 months on the team was not only slower than it was at the same track last year, it continued an alarming trend of getting progressively slower compared to its 2018 pace at every round so far. In Australia they were 0.13 seconds slower than they had been the previous season, which was bad enough, but since then the gap has only widened:

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It gets worse. This is the second race in a row where Williams have turned up with a slower car for two years running. In China they were .7 seconds slower than they were two years ago, and they are 2.7 seconds off their 2017 pace this weekend:

Year China Azerbaijan 2017 1’33.507 1’42.284 2018 1’34.062 1’43.585 2019 1’35.253 1’45.062

Every other team showed up with a car that was at least half a second quicker than the machine they raced last year. The teams which made the biggest gains were mostly Williams’ rival customer outfits:

This year’s best lap time was a full second inside the quickest seen last year:

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However 2018 lap times at Baku had been slower than those seen the year before. Nonetheless, Valtteri Bottas’s pole position lap of 1’40.495 established a new track record, almost a tenth of a second quicker than his team mate’s mark from two years ago:

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2019 Azerbaijan Grand Prix