Williams Formula 1 team boss James Vowles says it is “incredibly painful” for his squad to miss out the Barcelona shakedown test this week, but denies rumours the team’s car will be significantly overweight.
Last week Williams abandoned its plans to attend F1’s first testing opportunity of the 2026 pre-season in Barcelona, losing three days of running in Spain.
The reason given was “delays in the FW48 programme” which led to speculation that the Grove-based squad had failed its crash tests and had needed to strengthen its car considerably as a result, leading to an overweight chassis for the start of the 2026 campaign.
Explaining Williams’ issues in detail, Vowles owned up to the team biting off more than it could chew in its production process, but he also confirmed the team has passed the required crash tests and will test in Bahrain, and he denied that its delays will result in a significant weight penalty.
“The car this year that we’ve built is about three times more complicated than anything we have put through our business beforehand,” Vowles explained. “It means the amount of load going through our system is about three times what it used to be. And we started falling a little bit behind and late on parts.
“In addition to that, we have absolutely pushed the boundaries of what we’re doing in certain areas, and one of those is in certain corresponding tests that go with it. But those were only a blip in the grand scheme of things.
James Vowles, Williams Racing Team Principal
Photo by: Erik Junius
“They are one item out of quite a few that were pushing us absolutely beyond the limit of what we can achieve in the space of time that we have available to us. So it’s more of an output of pushing not just the boundaries of design, but the boundaries of simply how many components can be pushed through a factory in a very short space of time.”
On the car weight rumours, he added: “There’s no knowledge for the weight until we get to the second Bahrain test in terms of understanding where it is. You need to get all the sensor packs off to actually understand where we are. It’s impossible to know it because you need the car together without sensors in the right form, and that doesn’t exist today.
“The numbers we’re talking about are probably small enough that I need to see the car weighed in order for me to be able to assess where we are. So, it’s not miles over to that point. Right now, anything that you’re seeing is murmurings in the media.”
Vowles clarified that Williams could have made the Barcelona test after all, but that would have presented the team with a spare parts risk for the early part of the season that he wasn’t comfortable taking.
“We could have made Barcelona testing, simple as that. But in doing so, I would have to turn upside down the impact on spares components and updates across Bahrain, Melbourne and beyond,” he explained.
“The evaluation of it was that for running in a cold damp Barcelona against doing a virtual track test against the spare situation – and frankly, there was zero points for running in a shakedown test – we made the decision.
“I stand by it as the right thing to do, as is to make sure we’re turning up in Bahrain correctly prepared and prepared for Melbourne as well.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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