Williams reckon they have
"many" driver options for 2013. Here's a few that I think they might be considering:
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Pastor Maldonado, for obvious reasons. He brings money from PDVSA, and even if he is accident-prone, he is a race winner and has shown an obvious turn of speed with a race win and three top-three qualifying performances. He's had four clean races in a row now, which is hopefully a sign that he's turning things around, even if the team has slipped down the order a bit.
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Bruno Senna, because he is already in the team and does bring sponsor money. However, it is widely believed that PDVSA will pay Williams more and more with each passing year to keep Maldonado in the team, and with Senna genrally under-performing, sooner or later the team will get to the point where they think he is no longer worth it.
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Valtteri Bottas, who has been earmarked as the next Nico Hulkenberg. He's highly-rated by the team, getting a lot of track time and many people are under the belief that Williams will put him in a race seat sooner, rather than later.
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Jaime Alguersuari; Alguersuari was tipped for a vacant Sauber seat before the Hulkenberg-Gutierrez talk started up, and while Hulkenberg seems a lot more definite than Gutierrez, Gutierrez has the connections and the money. If Alguersuari has found a sponsor, he might be a good choice for Williams.
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Kamui Kobayashi. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: Kamui Koabayshi is one of two drivers on the grid (the other being Fernando Alonso) who truly epitomise the old-school Williams drivers: someone you can genuinely get excited about. He's believed to be losing his Sauber seat because he isn't performing and cannot find a sponsor to make up the difference, but if Williams are getting a king's ransom from PDVSA for Maldonado, they might be free to take a driver on merit.
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Robin Frijns. He'd be a huge risk, but his meteoric rise through Formula Renault cannot be overlooked. He currently has no support from any of the Formula 1 teams, but is keeping Jules Bianchi honest in Formula Renault. Again, Williams would probably need Maldonado's money to get him, but Frijns' performances should make it pretty easy to lure sposnors over. The Renault connection certainly helps.
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Adrian Sutil, who I think is a bit of an outside choice, but he was known to be talking with Williams when the Raikkonen deal fell apart. More importantly, he has what the team's current drivers lack at the moment: experience. It shouldn't be difficult for him to turn things around at Williams, though I don't know what the Force India mechanics thought of it.
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Heikki Kovalainen, who is known to be at the end of his Caterham contract this year, and wants progress from the team. Losing tenth place in the World Constructors' Championship might be the tipping point that pushes him elsewhere. That said, I've heard mixed things about Kovalainen; some claim that his feedback is quite poor and that Vitaly Petrov is working harder; others suggest Petrov is lazy and Kovalainen is the one guiding the team. His results are even harder to decipher - one the one hand, he was generally out-qualifying and out-racing Jarno Trulli in 2010 and 2011, but he's being out-raced by Petrov; in the fifteen races they have both finished, Petrov has beaten him eight times.
