Absent from the Barcelona shakedowns and with results in the Bahrain tests not being encouraging: a significant result could not be expected from Williams on the occasion of the first GP of the 2026 season in Australia, and so it was. The two drivers of the Grove team in fact finished outside the points zone, with the “best” placement obtained by Alex Albon.
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The Briton placed his FW48 in 12th position, confirming the difficulties the team is going through at the start of this championship: “It was a long race for us today – he commented – at the moment we are in a no man’s land and we are not fighting against the midfield, however our strategy was good, but it is clear that we lack pace. From the lap times it is evident that we are overweight and not producing enough downforce, and graining was also a problem for us today, especially with the hard tires. Realistically we know where we can find lap time and the team is working tirelessly on an aggressive plan to get closer to where we want to be. A positive aspect of today is that we accumulated kilometers and that we overcame some reliability issues in previous sessions, but we will learn as much as possible from this weekend to apply it next time in Shanghai”.
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Statements that join those of his teammate Carlos Sainz, 15th and also fully aware of all the work the team will have to do starting from the next Chinese GP: “It was a difficult weekend, with too many problems in every session – added the former Ferrari driver – we had a great start and I managed to climb up to twelfth position in the first laps. Unfortunately, we had a problem with the front wing that caused us to lose all aerodynamic balance and the understeer I accumulated meant that we started to degrade the tires significantly. From then on it became a test session for me, to be honest. This front wing problem is not new and we need to focus on resolving these types of issues quickly if we want to improve in the short term. We still have a lot of work to do, but I trust that we will be able to put together a good plan to make these improvements”.
