Where does being 'late' to 2026 leave Williams?
After being one of the first teams to switch their focus to 2026, Williams have become the last team to run their new car on track. So where does that leave them for the season?
For James Vowles, 2026 has been the focus: the key year for the recovery journey he put the team on back at the start of 2023. He viewed the new regulations as an opportunity, one that could provide Williams a real shot at progressing up the grid quickly, and to maximise that they "sacrificed” 2024 and 2025.
For 2024, that looked like stressing the system “to the absolute limit” according to Vowles, to allow the team not not only understand that system’s breaking points but to then address those infrastructure, design and manufacturing limits so they’re not limiting in the future.
That season though, Vowles felt they pushed too far: “You can change things at a certain rate. You go too far and you break it – in hindsight, moving things a little bit further than we can really deal with in one go.”
It left the team launching to media and fans with a show car, pushing their own filming day or, in other words, the FW46’s debut later and spending at least the first portion of the season trying to cut around 15kg from its weight. As the season progressed, the amount of attrition they suffered meant old parts were fitted just to keep them in races, limiting performance but also the budget that could be assigned to 2025.
While on the face of it, based on their results, the season looked dismal for Williams, behind the scenes Vowles insisted that their factory at Grove felt like a “different world” in terms of their “infrastructure, culture, people” and commercial make up.
“I've always said the journey is 2023, ‘24, ’25 – they're just progression and the track results won't necessarily reflect the really big changes going on behind the scenes,” Vowles told Autosport.
2025 may have only been projected as one of those “progression” seasons, but from the off things felt different. They now had Carlos Sainz on board, alongside Alex Albon, to jointly make up their most experienced line-up at the start of any season this century. The FW47 also was one of the first cars on the grid to break cover, doing so with a live shakedown at Silverstone in front of media, fans and a global audience virtually. It was also, unlike its predecessor, on weight from the outset - keeping development targeting performance, not simply closeness to the minimum limit.
