Williams in crisis
The period that Williams is going through is certainly not what was expected from the historic Grove team after last year’s good championship, finished in 5th place and favored by two podiums from Carlos Sainz, with the team and the Spanish driver who seemed to have started a regrowth project after a long crisis.
2026 instead saw the team’s absence from the pre-season tests in Barcelona due to chassis problems, with the FW48 encountering great difficulties throughout the rest of the championship and with Sainz himself often appearing frustrated and destined to end his marriage with the English team.
Vowles’ point of view
Yet, all these obstacles still represent a positive aspect, at least according to team principal James Vowles, former Mercedes strategic director. The engineer, in his intervention on the Up To Speed podcast, believes he took command of a team with obsolete structures, starting from then a restructuring program aimed at gradually returning to mid-field and subsequently fighting for the world title, where the team was before the collapse of competitiveness.
Problems, like those at the start of 2026, which for Vowles have been resolved, with setbacks forcing the team to strongly face all weaknesses: “I don’t think people are too harsh. Everyone, like me and all of us, wants Williams to return to the top – he commented – there are small aspects that did not go exactly as we would have liked during this winter and, frankly, it doesn’t seem like much, but we lost about two weeks. When you lose two weeks, you start to fall behind incredibly. Now everything is fine. Actually I think it is one of the best things that could have happened to us. It is often darkest before the dawn and, frankly, this is exactly the situation we are in now.”
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Disappointing results that, according to Vowles, allowed Williams to implement real changes, even with the spending cap that complicated the team’s reconstruction plans: “The spending cap is a fantastic thing. I fully believe in it, and it is the reason why this sport is successful, but at the same time it somewhat constrains things when there are 20 years in which you have not been exactly in the right place”, Vowles specified.
The team, meanwhile, is continuing to modernize its operations also by hiring new engineers, with Vowles confident of the definitive long-term solution: “We haven’t found the right balance yet this year, but I am very, very confident it will be solved in the future“.
