Williams make 'significant' admission as major F1 car problem revealed

Williams boss James Vowles has said that the team's 2026 F1 car is over 20kg overweight, and that there is no instant fix for the issue.

After missing the Barcelona shakedown test due to delays in car build and passing crash tests, upon the launch of the FW48, the technical specification listed the car's weight as 772.4kg, just 0.4kg heavier than Mercedes.

However, it has now become clear that the machine for Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz is significantly overweight as the team tries to counteract the problem. 

But detailing what problems it faces, Vowles has explained that due to the spending restrictions in place under the cost cap, the team cannot remove the weight instantly, even though it has the steps to transform the package to under the 768kg weight limit.

"It is not complicated to bring it down already, and what I have in my inbox today is all of the engineering steps to not just bring it down, but actually be underweight by a good amount," Vowles told media, including RacingNews365. 

"If this were a cost cap world, I would execute it tomorrow, and it would be done in a few weeks. It is not, so you've got to time it with when the components effectively start to go out of life and where we will be bringing upgrades later in the season.

"It is a complexity, but it is a good complexity. 

"If it was 20 kilos [overweight], it is more than that. It is not just the effective mass; when people calculate the number, they don't take into account the centre of gravity (CoG), and how it changes. They do not take into account the impact it has on the harvesting, on the minimum apex speed, which is impacted by the weight. 

"It is a significant enough problem that we have made some very serious changes to how we operate, how we work, but it is fixable in the year.

"That is really important to note, but what is frustrating to me is that the reality behind it is that it is an output from us showing that we are not at a level yet required for such a large regulation change.

"It is not something which happened last year; the car last year was below the weight limit, and I know the rules changed, but our ways of working are not sufficient to be able to deal with this amount of change.

"In a really weird way, I'm very happy as there is nothing in the company anymore which is hidden, and it is all fixable, and we are not that far away from fixing it.

"But the output of it is an overweight car that we have to deal with at the start of the season."