Williams expects to make real progress after the summer break

Two points and a ninth place in the constructors' world championship after three Grands Prix, that is the meager result of a team which had bet from 2022 on the 2026 season to return to the heights it regularly reached in the 90s and early 2000s. Williams has not yet succeeded in making the transition to the new era, with a car that is too heavy and generally lacks performance.

The forced break following the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix in April will allow the Grove team to find some solutions on its FW48, but according to James Vowles, it will be necessary to wait even longer, until the end of the summer, before seeing a much more competitive Williams, according to the development plan currently planned.

"It's clear that the pack of cars ranked between 5th and 7th place is incredibly tight; there isn't much of a gap."Vowles said. “The problem with the word ‘consistency’ is that even these teams don’t score points consistently; you have to stand out and outpace the entire field. Right now, what I can realistically predict is that we have a huge amount of work to do between now and the August break and beyond to effectively improve the car’s performance. Of course, the other teams will be doing the same; it’s all relative. I think some of that performance, especially from the top teams, will materialize after the August break.”

The British manager, who had insisted since his arrival in 2023 that the following three seasons would serve as a springboard for 2026, is facing a very different reality than expected. During the Japanese Grand Prix, the team even used the car ofAlexander albon, in any case too far from the points, to carry out any tests in preparation for the next Grand Prix.

“We know we weren’t able to score points, but we still want to make the most of these races and learn from them while we still can. To correlate the track with our wind tunnel and CFD facilities, we have several options. For example, you sometimes see Flo-Viz applied to the car by spraying it with paint. You sometimes see rakes used, especially during free practice – that’s clearly not something we’re going to install for a race. For us, what we were doing was essentially changing the front wing angle and making sure that what we were displaying as a map for the amount of downforce we had at the front of the car, but also at the rear, matched exactly at three or four different angles.” This simply helps us ensure there are no unexpected gains or losses, and that the map we're using is roughly correct as we progress through the wind tunnel.

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