Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Williams has admitted its 2026 development rate is not good enough and has launched a two-week review of the FW48’s entire season-long upgrade path after Silverstone failed to deliver the step the team needed.
Speaking in the latest episode of The Vowles Verdict, Williams team principal James Vowles said the problem goes beyond one disappointing package at the British Grand Prix. “I would say right now what’s clear is our rate of bringing performance to the car – which is a little bit nuanced in how I mean that – is not at the rate required in order for us to move forward,” he said.
That has pushed Williams into a broader audit of its development work before the Belgian Grand Prix. Vowles said the team now needs to understand “not just what we’ve done in Silverstone, but really what we’ve done across the entire season,” with the aim of sorting what has genuinely worked from what has not.
Silverstone sharpened those concerns rather than easing them. Williams introduced a new front wing at its home race and Vowles said the team had “worked diligently, day and night to bring performance to the car,” but the result fell short. “I think in part it helped, but nowhere near to the level we needed or perhaps even should have done,” he said. He also admitted the weekend produced “a little bit more” unknowns than the team had previously.
Carlos Sainz had already voiced the same concern after the race. Speaking to PlanetF1.com and other media, Sainz said the trend was becoming impossible to ignore. “Concerning and frustrating, because it starts to be a bad trend this year that we don’t seem to really find a lot of lap time when the upgrades are coming,” he said. He added: “It’s clear to me now that we’re having serious issues with developing this car, and we are not bringing the performance that we thought we were.”
The concern for Williams is that the car is still slipping backward in relative terms. The team began the season with an overweight FW48 and has continued taking weight out of it, but the return in lap time has not been enough. After nine rounds, Williams is eighth in the constructors’ championship with 11 points, and the gap to the front of the midfield has grown rather than closed.
Vowles said the next phase is to go through the evidence quickly and systematically. He described the process as reviewing what is data-driven and factual, while isolating the remaining unknowns that Silverstone exposed. Williams expects that work to be completed “within the next two weeks.”
That timeline matters because the findings will shape far more than the next update. Vowles said the review will define “what we do in Spa, what we do in Budapest, what we do across the remainder of the season, and what we do going into next year at the same time,” making this investigation central to whether Williams can stop its 2026 slide and recover a development direction that can move it forward again.