Williams offer fresh insight into troubled birth of 2026 F1 car

Williams boss James Vowles has offered fresh insight into the delays encountered, which caused the troubled birth of the FW47 F1 machine.

Owing to the huge scale of work demanded by the 2026 cars, Williams was one of, if not the earliest, team to switch its full focus onto the new regulations, with Vowles pinpointing 2026 as a major opportunity for the team given the work behind the scenes he has led since joining from Mercedes ahead of the 2023 season.

However, the car for Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz missed the Barcelona shakedown due to delays and not passing certain FIA crash tests, although the FW47 was on track for a Silverstone filming day ahead of official pre-season testing in Bahrain.

The car is significantly over the 768kg dry weight limit, with this having a huge impact on performance. 

At the Miami GP, the team started its weight reduction programme, as Sainz and Albon finished in ninth and 10th for the team's first double points haul of the season, with the three points combined more than the team had scored in the first three races combined, just two for Sainz's ninth place in China.

During the weekend, Vowles explained at length just how "the first proper car build" of the new Williams era under his leadership had fallen victim to "hundreds" of "tiny, small details" all adding up. 

"We made a lot of changes a few years ago, putting in different ways of doing planning, different ways of structuring, different ways of working, and this was the first proper car build where all of those were brought into account," Vowles explained when asked by RacingNews365 for the reason for the delay and the overweight car.

"I think we have made some mistakes on some of that software that we’ve been using. It was our first proper go at planning a completely new regulation car from start to finish. 

"And when we went through effectively a global review of all of that, it’s tiny, small details, but hundreds of them starting to add up. So, there were just inefficiencies across the board that weren’t taken into account and only came to light once you started stressing the system. 

"Whilst we started early in the wind tunnel, no doubt about that, we did not start the build of the car early because what you want to do is keep all of that goodness in the wind tunnel as long as possible, and we wanted to stress ourselves to the point of not quite a championship team but more aggressive than we had done before. 

"The car we produced is the most complex. It doesn’t matter if I use a number of parts; it’s about two times the number of parts. Doesn’t matter if I only use the number of parts in the chassis or the time it took; all of it was about one and a half to two times more complex, and it didn’t go smoothly through much of that process.

"Your reaction, it might not seem this way, but your reaction, once that starts to happen, is that there are very few alternatives. You can’t really go to outside manufacturers because they are all booked up by other individuals. 

"So, once you start falling behind, you’re in trouble. There were a number of crash tests, but some were passed incredibly well, some were difficult, frankly, and that put load back into the system at a very difficult point as well.

"Once you start running out of time, weight is quite an easy addition to effectively get a part through to make sure that you are in a sensible place. It basically turns into a heavy car very quickly as a result. So that’s sort of a ballpark summary of it."