The “self-fulfilling injury” in Williams’s 2024 F1 crash-fest

Alex Albon says Williams suffered a “self-fulfilling injury” with the early season timesaving but weight-adding measures on its 2024 Formula 1 car, which led to additional crash damage.

The British team’s 2024 season was blighted by crashes from start to finish, with its FW46 car also starting the year over the weight limit of 798kg to the extent it was losing 0.45 seconds a lap before it was lightened via its development programme.

In part, this was due to the initial iterations of certain chassis components – such as suspension parts – being made from metal instead of lighter carbon-fibre.

This was deemed necessary because Williams changed its car build process for the year just gone, which meant parts arrived much later, as it strived to modernise its production system.

Metal parts are quicker to produce than those in carbon, with Williams also trying to make its car lighter overall anyway.

It managed to shed 14kg from its total chassis weight compared to 2023, while still being over the limit.

But the added weight of metal parts meant more force going through a monocoque in a crash, such as when Williams was forced to sideline Logan Sargeant after Albon crashed in Australian Grand Prix practice, his chassis was too damaged to be used again and the team did not have a spare at the time.

Albon revealed the situation when asked if there was any particular cause for the many crashes he, Franco Colapinto and Sargeant had in the season just gone.

“There’s a mix,” Albon told Autosport in an exclusive interview. “There’s a mix of driver errors, there’s a mix of issues.

“I wouldn’t call them issues around the car but, for example, like Brazil [where Albon crashed in the wet Q3], there are things where in a technical point of view, it’s kind of a driver problem, but it’s not really.

“It’s just systems that were… we changed and areas where they were just kind of very hard.

“Together, we could have done a better job and I think we would have been able to avoid it. So, there’s a bit of that going on.

“There’s also just, even if you take the start of the year, for example, we went through quite a few tubs. I think Melbourne was one. Suzuka was one.

“But, actually, if you look at it, part of the problem is within the weight [issue] itself.

“We had some pieces on the car that were metallic rather than carbon. So, they actually were creating some of the broken tubs.

“So, it was almost like a self-fulfilling injury that we had. So, there’s stuff like that, which from race one [meant] we were on the back foot.”

When Autosport put Albon’s point to Williams’s chief engineer Dave Robson, he replied: “Yes, that is true to some extent.

“Not sure whether that cause and effect statement is exactly right, but we definitely had some metallic components on the car that are now all carbon and should have been carbon from the outset.

“And that definitely does change the load that goes through the chassis, so these are the front suspension parts.

“The reason for doing that is you can design say a metallic trackrod much more quickly and machine them much more quickly than you can make carbon components.

“So, once you get behind, that’s a way of recovering some of the time. You pay a small mass penalty for the component itself if it’s something like a trackrod.

“They were on the car for a while and then we soon updated those and definitely if you do that [for] some of the front suspension components and then you suffer a heavy impact, loads of the chassis are a bit different so yeah it probably did contribute to some of the initial issues.”