Williams' season-long tale of woe carried through into Japan when neither driver saw the end of Friday's second practice.
Finishing 17th and 18th in Practice One, Rubens Barrichello and Pastor Maldonado were both in desperate need of track-time in order to improve their pace. But it wasn't to be.
Barrichello, with only 25 laps under his belt for the day, was the first out in FP2 when the Brazilian made a mistake at the first Degner, putting his car into the barriers and causing significant damage.
"I had limited running today which was unfortunate," he said.
"In this morning's session, a puncture cut my session short and then an off this afternoon also put me out early. The car felt quite loose before the incident and so we have a lot of things to look into now."
And the team's problems mounted when Maldonado, who had amassed just 24 laps, retired his car shortly afterwards.
"An engine problem caused me to stop early in P2. It's my first time at Suzuka so I really need some more laps. We'll have our work cut out in tomorrow's final session," said the Venezuelan.
However, chief operations engineer Mark Gillan is hopeful that the team can recover as the weekend progresses.
"We've had a difficult start to the weekend with not as much running as we had hoped for. Accordingly, we have now revised the running plan going into P3," he said.
"We did improve the set-up between sessions one and two with some aero development and mechanical adjustments on the cars."
