Autobayng News Team
Williams looked like a renewed force last year as James Vowles, in his third season as team principal, guided them to their best championship finish since 2017.
But Vowles insisted their resurgence to fifth in the championship had not diverted any attention away from capitalising on the opportunities presented by this year’s change in regulations.
“We wanted to make a step forward from where we were,” he said at the end of last year. “We wanted to make sure that we demonstrated to the world we’re a different team to where we have been and that we’ll make strides forward, but never losing focus on our future, i.e. 2026 and beyond.”
The changes Vowles was making behind the scenes at Williams also formed a key part of his successful pitch to Carlos Sainz Jnr to join the team last year. Come the end of the season, Sainz could justifiably congratulate himself for ignoring the overtures from Alpine, who ended the year at the bottom of the standings, for Williams, for whom he scored two grand prix podium finishes.
But four rounds into the 2026 season which was Williams’ focus for so long, the situation is entirely different. Alpine have scored in every round and lie fifth in the championship, clearly leading the midfield scrap. Williams have picked up just five points.
Williams’s slow start to the season was far from unexpected. It was the only team which failed to have its car ready in time to participate in the first pre-season test at the Circuit de Catalunya, held over five days in January.
Vowles admitted they had “a really messy winter.” The unexpected break created by the cancellation of F1’s two races in the Middle East may have been more welcome at their Grove base than anywhere else.
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“The break gave us an opportunity to reset, take a breath, catch up, and form a plan,” he said. “Not just for Miami, of which we brought upgrades here, but really what we’re doing now across everywhere up until the end of the season to put ourselves back into a sensible position, fundamentally.”
Vowles has spoken before about how, when he arrived at Williams from Mercedes in 2023, he discovered a team whose internal processes had fallen far behind the standard found among the front-runners. However modernising those systems brought their own challenges and complications during the off-season.
“We made a lot of changes a few years ago, putting in ERP (enterprise resource planning), PLM (product lifecycle management) systems, different ways of doing planning, different ways of structuring, different ways of working,” Vowles explained. “This was the first proper car build where all of those brought into account.
“I think we have made some mistakes on some of that software that we’ve been using. It was our first proper go at planning a completely new regulation car from start to finish.
“When we effectively went through a global review of all of that, it’s tiny, small details but hundreds of them starting to add up. So, there were just inefficiencies across the board that weren’t taken into account and only came to light once you started stressing the system.”
As the team’s research uncovered more development opportunities for their FW48, the complexity of their design became too great a burden.
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“We started early in the wind tunnel, no doubt about that, [but] we did not start the build of the car early,” Vowles explained. “What you want to do is keep all of that goodness in the wind tunnel as long as possible. We wanted to stress ourselves to the point of – not quite a championship team – but more aggressive than we had done before.
“The car we produced is the most complex. It doesn’t matter if I use the number of parts – it’s about two times the number of parts – or the time it took, all of it was about one-and-a-half to two times more complex and it didn’t go smoothly through much of that process.”
The team’s problems snowballed from there. “Once that starts to happen is there is very few alternatives. You can’t really go to outside manufacturers because they are all booked up by other individuals. So, once you start falling behind, you’re in trouble.”
Vowles indicated some parts had to be redesigned to ensure they passed crash tests. “There was a number of crash tests: some were passed incredibly well, some were difficult, frankly, and that put load back into a system at a very difficult point as well.”
The team eventually accepted the compromise of producing a car which was overweight, knowing they could trim it back through upgrades after the season began. “Once you start running out of time, weight is quite an easy addition to effectively get a part through to make sure that you are in a sensible place,” he said. “It becomes, basically, a heavy car very quickly as a result.”
Vowles said those upgrades will arrive in the most efficient manner for the team’s development programme, given the budget cap.
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“The engineering work is done, so the designers aren’t designing, fundamentally. But you have to make sure you’re printing the components in a way that makes sense. So, in other words, we could take out, and we have [in Miami], several kilos out of the floor because we’ve done a new floor.
“I don’t want to just make exactly the same front wing being several kilos lighter. That doesn’t make any sense to anyone. So, you’ve got to body that into an aerodynamic update at the same time. And so that’s the efficient way in cost cap of doing it.
“We could right now take out [weight], if there was no cost cap, print the other bits in the car. We have capacity, we’d take out pretty much all the weight. But there’s some mechanisms that we have to do along that journey. It’s painful but it’s balancing adding aerodynamic performance as well as weight reduction.”
Williams appeared to take a step in the right direction in Miami. Sainz and Alexander Albon both finished in the top 10 for the first time this year, though aided by the retirement of Pierre Gasly’s Alpine in a crash.
Vowles said the team has a clear goal before it begins prioritising its 2027 design. “For me, it’s as we get to where we finish developing the car, which will be after the August break, that the car is sensibly back to being the top of the midfield, with everything in a sensible position, building on next year’s car.
“The engineering that’s been done over the last five weeks is all the weight is removed from the car – it’s not delivered yet, but the engineering work is complete – plus another 10 kilos on top of that. That’s a sensible step.
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“Pit stops are back to being in the top three, top four. There’s 150 pit stops completed. That we bring aerodynamic performance that translates on track. Here [in Miami] we’ve had an aero update and exhaust.” Another “40, 50 performance projects” are coming.
Williams have had many worse starts to a season than this in recent years. How successfully they bounce back from this one, and whether their 2027 development goes more smoothly, will be a vital test of whether Vowles’ changes are working.
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