After launching their new 2009 contender, the FW31, the Williams team completed a four day test at the new Portimao circuit in Portugal where the plan was to put the new car through some vigorous testing in preparation for the season to come.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t very accommodating with rain, wind and even hail falling over the course of the week. At the end of the week, there was just one day that saw any progress made at all, Wednesday, when regular driver Nico Rosberg was at the wheel.

“The time we did get on track was productive though and allowed the team to work through our scheduled systems checks and aero and mechanical tests with the new car,” explained Sam Michael, Williams technical Director.

While the Grove based squad were comfortable enough with the progress made, especially as they finished the test quickest of all new 2009 cars, Michael admitted that they are nowhere near confident that they are on the leading pace just yet as further testing needs to be done to reveal just where they stand in comparison with rivals at Ferrari, McLaren, Ferrari and Toyota.

"We had a good initial run with the FW31 and it was quite satisfying in terms of reliability," he told Autosport. "But in terms of performance, it is way too early to say where the teams are. There are too many variables in there to say where everyone is. There'll be a lot more information in the next test at Jerez, but with what we've done so far it's too early to say where anyone is. The pattern is going to shift a lot between now and the first race as people dial their setups to the slick tyres."

"The thing that probably helped us was that we, along with BMW, did interim cars that had wide front wings and narrow rear wings. That helped us to see things, even though those parts were quite out of date in terms of where you would be for 2009. It helped us in understanding how they interact with the slicks. A lot of other teams didn't do that. But it doesn't take long to catch up on those sorts of things."