Kubica told reporters at the Sakhir circuit on Thursday the struggling former world champions were short of spare parts and would have to play safe on track to avoid any damage to the cars.

Last overall in 2018, Williams were late to finish their 2019 car and missed two days of pre-season testing. They were also slowest by some margin in the Australian season-opener two weeks ago.

“Inevitably we’ve got a little bit of a backlog from not having got the car out when we needed to in testing but everyone’s worked really hard at the factory to make sure we’ve got the spares we need,” Williams told Sky Sports television.

“We’ve got spares for all the parts that we need. We’ve just got to make sure the drivers don’t do anything on track to jeopardise that,” she added.

“I think a lot of teams at this time of year anyway are in a similar kind of position, clearly we didn’t help ourselves but it’s not anything that I’m overly concerned about.”

Kubica and British rookie team mate George Russell, last year’s Formula Two champion, were slowest in Friday’s first free practice in Bahrain, some 3.8s of the pace set by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.

Russell said in Australia the car had a ‘fundamental problem’ that would take months to fix.

Kubica told reporters on Thursday that it was not an easy situation.

“We will be limited with spare parts and everything,” he said. “You cannot go over the kerbs, or you go over the kerbs but the risk is that the car will fall apart and then you have no parts to fit them.”