Williams head of performance engineering Rob Smedley says his team must admit it has problems if it is to address its car's weaknesses.
Williams is third in the constructors' championship after a strong first half of the year, but has had several anomalous results at certain tracks. At the Monaco Grand Prix both cars finished outside the points after struggling to get the Pirelli tyres working and the team failed to score again at the Hungarian Grand Prix ahead of the summer break. Williams has also struggled in wet conditions, most notably at the British Grand Prix when its drivers looked set for a podium before rain hit in the second half of the race and dropped them to a distant fourth and fifth.
"One of the keys to solving a problem is admitting you have one and then working as a group of people to understand it," Smedley said. "We're on a constant quest to understand why we can't carry as much mid-corner speed in the low and medium speed corners as our principle competitors. As we understand a bit more we will work that into the design, not only for the 2016 car, but for this car as well.
"We are constantly trying to evolve that process of understanding. As soon as we understand something, we try to get to the car - and if not as a definite improvement it's as a way to understand the problem further."
Asked about the specific problems the team has had in slow-speed corners and wet weather, Smedley added: "It goes back to being very clear and admitting you've got problems. Without going into every detail that we have internally, we sat down and we said in Monaco we had a big problem. But rather than forget about it and say it's a one-off, my philosophy is to say it's entirely unacceptable to get pasted like that, so we then set up a performance working group to look at that, which is an evolving process.
"Recently we did the same thing with wet performance. We said we had a real problem with it and even if we want to say that everything looks perfect from the mechanical side or the aero side or the tyre management side, that shouldn't be how we approach it. We should sit down as a group of people and do things as diligently and thoroughly as we can - almost forensically to a certain extent - and understand what we are doing in the wet.
"In Silverstone, although it was a very painful event in the wet, it did actually teach us a lot in terms of vehicle management during the damp and wet period. There were some very key points there we could pick out and concentrate on to give us the answer.
"It's not like Monaco where it was a really bleak overview and you have to go into it and look at every single bit, there were some real tell-tale signs for our analysts to have a look at. Silverstone was really good for us from that point of view and we learnt a lot. When we go to Spa the hope is that we can put into practice the stuff we learned from Silverstone. I'm not saying it will make up all the deficit, but it should help us."