RacingDavid Coulthard reached for Ron Dennis’ old line to defend James Vowles as Williams slides down the order. On the Up To Speed podcast, the former Williams driver said Vowles’ “saving grace” is that he “hasn’t designed it,” recalling Dennis telling him in 1996, “I don’t design the car, I don’t build the car, I don’t drive the car. Therefore, I’m struggling to understand which part of this problem is me.”
The results sting. Williams has scored only two points from the first three rounds, all from Carlos Sainz’s ninth place in Shanghai, and sits ninth in the Constructors’ standings, ahead of only Cadillac and Aston Martin. The FW48 is overweight, and it shows. In Japan, Sainz, a Williams driver, said, “For sure, it’s been a shock for me, for the team, for James [Vowles], for Alex [Albon], for all the engineers,” speaking to media at the track.
This started before the cars even raced. Williams missed the Barcelona shakedown after late production, a call Vowles said he made to preserve parts and updates for the opening flyaways. “We could have made it [to Barcelona testing], but in doing so, I would have to turn upside down the impact on spares, components and updates across Bahrain, Melbourne and beyond,” Vowles, the Williams team principal, told the media including PlanetF1.com in a briefing. He added, “I stand by it that the right thing to do is to make sure we’re turning up in Bahrain correctly prepared and prepared in Melbourne as well.”
The weight problem is the headline issue and Vowles says there is a route out. In a media session at the Chinese GP, he said he already had proposals “in my inbox today” to get the FW48 “underweight by a good amount,” but warned the cost cap means the plan must roll out in phases. “If this were not a cost cap world, I would execute it tomorrow… you’ve got to time it,” he said. He also stated the car is “more than” 20 kilos over and explained why the hit is bigger than a simple number. “They don’t take into account the centre of gravity, and how it changes. They do not take into account the impact it has on the harvesting, on the minimum apex speed,” he said, calling it “fixable in the year.”
Sainz stressed the deficit is not only mass. Speaking to media on Saturday in Japan, he said, “When I see the gap to the top teams, and even today [Saturday], [Pierre] Gasly was 1.2 seconds quicker than us. That’s not all weight, and we need to add downforce.” He added, “Between the weight and the [aero] load, we haven’t got things right, but I’m hopeful that once we find the right way, we are able to start adding performance.”
Coulthard’s message frames the pressure on Vowles. The team boss is fronting the fix under cost-cap limits, but, as Coulthard argued on the podcast, he did not design the FW48. The work now is to make the car lighter and add load, and Vowles says the plan is already mapped out.