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After days of
speculation as to why the Atlassian Williams F1 Team had decided to not
attend the first of the pre-season Formula One tests at Barcelona Williams
Team Principal James Vowles finally made a public statement addressing the
situation.
In a meeting with selected media on Wednesday, Vowles
spoke of how their decision to miss Barcelona was "clearly wasn't our plan"
and that it was "incredibly painful" one to make. But he did emphasise the
issues that the team has been having came from a desire to "push the limits
of performance under the new regulations".
To clear up some of the
speculation Vowles confirmed that the FW48 had passed all mandatory crash
tests and they are ready to take part in the next official pre-season
testing in Bahrain mid February. He also stated that the team is going to
complete a filming day ahead of the first of two three-day Bahrain tests.
Vowles said: "We are transforming here in Williams and fast. One of the
tasks that has been on my shoulders for a few years is making sure we
transform this business at the absolute maximum rate possible and, 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.
"I'm
confident in our decision to miss Barcelona and I’m confident it was the
right one to prepare for the first test in Bahrain and Melbourne.
"I'm pleased to say that we've passed all necessary tests and we're ready to
run in Bahrain and we'll carry out a promotional filming day ahead of it."
It should be noted that the Williams teams are still in the process of a
massive infrastructure rebuild that is far from complete. The team only just
recently got the go ahead from the local government to start the building of
new facilities at their Grove headquarters. Added onto this was Vowles
emphasis that the new 2026 regulations have been "three times more
complicated" than anything they have previously had to deal with since he
joined in 2023. These aspects would see the team "started falling a little
bit behind and late on parts".
Vowles added: "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, 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, so it's
more of an output than anything else – of pushing not just the boundaries of
design but the boundaries of just simply how many components can be pushed
through the factory in a very short space of time."
In his meeting
with media Vowles was asked about the speculation that the FW48 is
overweight. Vowles responded by saying: "There’s no knowledge of the weight
until we get to Bahrain in terms of understanding where it is."
"There’s not a single person that will truly know it. It’s impossible to
know it, because you need the car together without sensors in the right
form. And that doesn’t exist today.
"If we end up being over the
weight target then from that point along, it’ll be an aggressive programme
to get it off.
"But I think right now, anything that you’re seeing as
murmurings in the media are murmurings.
"I’ll come out and explain to
everyone at the point where we know that. That isn’t today."
Williams, like all other teams, is having to contend with a set of
regulations that have imposed even lower limits on the cars weight, now
being 30kg lighter, but this has to be taken in light of the fact that the
2026 power units are even heavier making the task of reducing the chassis
weight even more demanding.
Vowles said that it was possible for the
team to have run the FW48 at Barcelona but this would have impacted the
remainder of the teams programme.
"We could have made it, but in
doing so, I would have to turn upside down the impact on spares, components
and updates across Bahrain, Melbourne and beyond, Vowles added.
"And
the evaluation of it was that for running in a cold, damp Barcelona, against
doing a VTT test, against the spare situation - and frankly, there was zero
points for running in a shakedown test - we made the decision.
"And 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."
Time
will tell whether the lack of running at Barcelona will have a marked impact
of the rest of the Williams team's testing in Bahrain. Have they given other
teams an advantage. From the comments made by Vowles yes it was a tough
decision not to go but that he feels it has now allowed the team to be in a
better position going forward to Bahrain and then Australia. |
