Williams F1 boss James Vowles says he stands by what he called an “incredibly painful” decision for the new FW48 to miss the first test of the season in Barcelona.
The team announced last week that it had decided not to go to Spain and aim instead for the next test session, which commences in Bahrain on February 11. It switched its focus to VTT, or Virtual Test Track, running in the factory, in which a mechanically complete car, power unit and gearbox—but without wings—runs on a rig under simulated conditions.
Nine of the other teams have been running in Spain this week; Aston Martin is also late, and its new Honda-powered car has yet to run. (However the Silverstone team said it still hoped to make to Barcelona by Thursday or Friday.) In essence, Williams ran out of time to have the FW48 ready to its complete satisfaction, without introducing compromises. It’s a fascinating case study of just how hard it is to get a competitive F1 car on track—especially when new regulations are in play.
All teams have had to deal with more stringent chassis crash tests this season, which often take time to pass. There’s also the bigger picture of Williams undergoing a major restructuring as Vowles attempts to make it into a front-running contender after years of lagging behind. That process in itself is a complex one—and, combined with the efforts to come up with the most competitive design for the new regulations, proved to be a little too much for the system.
“It clearly wasn't our plan, and it's incredibly painful,” Vowles said of the decision to delay the car’s debut until next month. “But I do want it to be acknowledged that it's the result of our determination to push the limits of performance under the new regulations. We are transforming here in Williams, and fast. One of the tasks that have been on my shoulders for a few years is making sure we transform this business at the absolute maximum rate possible.”
Vowles noted that such a strategy brought challenges. “In my experience, the only way you achieve that is pushing the boundaries and limits hard and aggressively and find your limitations. There's no point being just underneath the curve, or well and truly underneath the curve, if you want to transform at speed. You need to find the pain points and put them right very quickly, which is exactly what we're doing.”
Intriguingly, Vowles said that the team still had a chance to physically make it to Barcelona with the car when the call to cancel the trip was made—but it would have been such a rush, compromises would have been made that could prove expensive later on in the process.
“We could have made Barcelona testing,” he said. “Simple as that. But in doing so, I would have to turn upside down the impact on spares, components and updates across Bahrain, Melbourne and beyond. And the evaluation of it was that for running in a cold, damp Barcelona—against doing a VTT test, against the spares situation, and frankly, zero points running in a shakedown test... we made the decision. I stand by it that the right thing to do is to make sure we're turning up at Bahrain correctly prepared, and prepared in Melbourne as well.”
Vowles made the interesting observation that the delays came in part because the car is the most complicated Williams has ever made, as it tries to match the very best and reach the top level once again. “The car that we've built this year, just to put a number on it—and it doesn't matter if I use number of hours or number of components—is about three times more complicated than anything we have put through our business beforehand,” he said. “So to put that in perspective, it means the amount of load going through our system is about three times what it used to be. And we started falling a little bit behind and late on parts.”
Tellingly, he takes responsibility for the mismatch. “I'm actually incredibly happy the car is more complex, but I didn't scale the business in the right way to achieve the output, clearly.”
In parallel with that was the overall effort to hit the ground running with the most competitive possible package under the 2026 rules. And that meant testing the limits in areas such as the maximum permissible wing flexing. “We have absolutely pushed the boundaries of what we're doing in certain areas, and one of those is in certain corresponding tests that go with it,” said Vowels. “But those were only I would say, a blip in the grand scheme of things. They are one item out of quite a few that were pushing us absolutely beyond the limit of what we can achieve in the space of time that we have available to us.”
On the plus side, both the Mercedes power unit and gearbox are getting some mileage in Spain. The works team is doing Williams a favor by proving out those items, while McLaren and Alpine are also adding learning miles to the PU and gathering useful data.
Vowles believes that ultimately, Williams won’t lose out—as long as the team can make full use of the two three-day tests in Sakhir next month. “We're fortunate,” he said. “We have the power unit provided by Mercedes, the gearbox provided by Mercedes. So the learning that they're going through this week in Barcelona will carry over into us, into Bahrain. Now, it's not that I want to be resting on their hard work. But I'm confident that with six days in Bahrain, we will run through the program that we need to, and it's why we're on the VTT."
"What I wanted to do," he stressed, "is to make sure that from the outset in Bahrain, we have a reliable car ready to go.”
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