James Vowles has explained why Williams had a ‘messy’ winter in preparation for the new-for-2026 regulations, with the team finally securing its first double points finish of the season last weekend in the Miami Grand Prix.
Much was expected of Williams with new chassis and powertrain regulations being implemented for 2026 and the team announcing it had switched its focus early last year.
But drivers Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon have found themselves on the back foot with the FW48, with Sainz recording a best result of only P9 and Albon unable to finish in the points prior to Miami last weekend.
In Sunday’s 57-lap race, the pair were able to use new upgrades on the car to move further up the order, as Sainz claimed P9 from Albon in P10.
Ahead of the race in Miami, Vowles explained that Williams’ preparation for the new season had been messy, being the first time that new systems and procedures all worked together to develop a completely new car from the ground up.
“It’s tiny, small details but hundreds of them that add up,” said Vowles in the Team Principals’ press conference. “It’s inefficiencies across the board that weren’t taken into account and only came to light once you start stressing the system.
“While we started early in the wind tunnel, we did not start the build of the car early because what you want to do is keep all of that goodness in the wind tunnel as long as possible and we wanted to stress ourselves to the point of, not quite a championship team, but more aggressively than we had done before.
“The car we produced is the most complex. All of it is about one-and-a-half to two times more complex and it didn’t go smoothly for much of that process.
“Your reaction once that starts to happen is there’s very few alternatives. Once you start falling behind you’re in trouble. There were a number of crash tests, some were passed incredibly well, some were difficult frankly and that put load back into the system at a very difficult point as well.”
A general consensus across the paddock is that the Williams car is one of the heaviest on the grid, with excess weight added because of failed crash tests ahead of testing, with the team missing the initial shakedown of the new cars in January.
Vowles admits that adding weight to improve the integrity of parts was an easy solution, but that shedding that excess weight is now part of a process limited by the budget cap.
“You have to make sure you’re printing components that make sense. We could take out, and we have this weekend, several kilos out of the floor because we’ve done a new floor,” said Vowles.
“I don’t want to just make exactly the same front wing but several kilos lighter, that doesn’t make any sense to anyone so you’ve got to body that in to an aerodynamic update at the same time.
“That’s the efficient way under a cost cap of doing it. If there was no cost cap, we could print the other bits of the car, take out all the weight but there’s some mechanisms we have to do along that journey.
“It’s painful but it’s balancing adding aerodynamic performance as well as weight reduction.”