[citation needed] Williams was the second team in terms of kilometres covered and showed some reliability, but were off pace from front-runners Red Bull, Ferrari, and McLaren.

[citation needed] The season started off with Barrichello finishing 10th at the Bahrain Grand Prix, while Hulkenberg made a mistake at turn 6 and skidded across the track, but recovered to 14th.

In the next rounds, Barrichello finished 9th in Australia, while Hulkenberg was involved in a first-lap incident with Kamui Kobayashi, after the Japanese driver's front wing failed and sent him into the barrier, rebounding into the path of Hülkenberg.

In the race, Williams gambled on a two-stop strategy for Hülkenberg, a mistake that shunted the German driver down the order where he was caught up in a duel with a struggling Rosberg.

Barrichello benefited from Lewis Hamilton's late crash to score two points, finishing in 9th, despite starting 18th on the grid and equalled Ayrton Senna's record of highest-scoring Brazilian driver in Formula One.

Barrichello moved up to sixth position through the first corner, while Hulkenberg lost control in the middle of the tunnel and hit the wall, damaging his front left suspension and causing a safety car.

Later, Barrichello had a suspension failure caused by hitting a loose drain cover coming out of turn 1, and crashed heavily up the hill.

At the Canadian Grand Prix, Barrichello qualified eleventh, narrowly missing Q3 but his anti-stall system kicked in at the start of the race.

Hülkenberg's right rear tyre delaminated on lap 50, causing damage to his car's exhaust system and became the race's final retirement, while Barrichello defended from Kubica to finish in a strong 4th place.

He became the highest-scoring Brazilian driver in Formula One history, overhauling Ayrton Senna's career tally of 614 points, which he had been tied with since Spain.

Williams had been attempting a similar strategy to BMW Sauber with Kamui Kobayashi in Valencia by having Barrichello pit late and charge back up through the field on super-soft tyres.

In Singapore, the FW32 sported a new front wing, and Barrichello put this to good use to set the sixth fastest time in qualifying, although Williams technical director Sam Michael reckoned the car was fast enough to be a couple of positions higher.

This tyre gamble proved successful for Nico Hülkenberg, who took advantage of the situation and qualified over a second ahead of the next quickest cars, taking his first pole position.

For Barrichello, after a delayed pitstop, his traditional bad luck on home soil returned when he suffered a puncture after briefly colliding with Jaime Alguersuari, costing him any chance of scoring points.

However, when the safety car was deployed following Michael Schumacher's and Vitantonio Liuzzi's crash, many drivers like Robert Kubica, Vitaly Petrov and Nico Rosberg took advantage of this by pitting early.