Williams suffered five major incidents in the last two races leaving them with a significant damage bill and a scarce supply of spare parts.
Brazil’s ‘super Sunday’ format meant a significant crash for Alex Albon in qualifying saw him sit out the grand prix, while Franco Colapinto brought out the red flag in qualifying and the race, hitting the wall on the main straight as the rain got heavier.
Their team principal James Vowles addressed this following the grand prix in his post-race review for Williams, saying: “There’s no team on the grid that can cope with five major accidents in two race weekends.”
“Simply the matter of spares we carry are not sufficient to carry that amount of attrition.”
These words from Vowles have been misconstrued by some to mean that Williams won’t have enough parts to race in the upcoming Las Vegas Grand Prix, but this is not the case, as they confirmed earlier today.
Instead, the challenge the team face is to piece together two cars good enough to allow them to continue their fight in the Constructors’ standings as their budget cap gets ever closer and parts run low.
After Brazil Vowles said, “what that looks like is difficult to predict”, but with two weeks having passed for the team to take inventory of their parts and assess the damage in more detail, the picture may be more clear now and it’s expected that the team will provide more information on their planned specifications next week.
Las Vegas could represent an important opportunity for Williams to regain on their closest championship rivals Visa Cash App RB, Haas and Alpine who each benefitted at different points of the Americas triple header. Last year Vowles felt it was one of their “best opportunities” to score, and while Albon narrowly missed out on points, their qualifying results over both cars were the best they had seen for six years.
Williams are in a period of rebuilding, requiring compromise and sacrifice to benefit the “grand scheme of a multi-year programme”, in Vowles’ words. While this tough run of late could be seen as a setback, Vowles feels it has reinforced his aim to bring Williams back to being “successful and performant”.
“It’s rooted me even further more to the fact of what we have to do to achieve it is significant, but we can achieve it together as a team.”
