Racing
© Spencer
Williams scored its first double-points finish of the season in Miami, but the package that put Carlos Sainz ninth and Alex Albon 10th was, in Sainz’s words, the car “that was supposed to come to Race 1” finally arriving four rounds late.
That result lifted Williams to eighth in the constructors’ standings on five points and clear of Audi, offering the first clear sign that the FW48’s difficult start can be reversed. But both Sainz and team principal James Vowles made the same point after the race: Miami was a needed step, not the finished product.
Sainz said the team had finally fitted the package it had intended to have from the start of the season, after early delays left Williams chasing lost ground. “We finally put on the upgrade of the car that was supposed to come to Race 1,” he said. “Because of all the delays we had at the beginning of the season,” Williams had only now been able to bring that package to the car. He said it was “performing at least at the level of the midfield cars,” but added: “We know we still have a lot of weight to shed off the car.”
Vowles, in Williams’ post-race “Vowles Verdict,” set out the scale of the work behind the breakthrough. Over the five-week gap before Miami, the team worked on “around about 30 performance projects,” delivering a package that included “a new floor, revised bodywork, front wing modifications, altered rear suspension, exhaust blowing development, and a small but meaningful reduction in car weight.”
The weight loss matters because Williams began the season with an overweight car and has been trying to trim it back without wasting money under the cost cap. Before Miami, Vowles described the team’s winter as “messy,” saying Williams had tried to build a much more complex car using new systems and procedures that did not come together smoothly. Failed crash tests and integrity fixes added to the problem, and he said the most efficient way to remove kilos now is to combine lighter parts with aerodynamic updates rather than remake components for weight alone.
Miami showed the first proper payoff from that approach, but Sainz made clear how much ground remains to recover. He said Williams was “sixth fastest” over the weekend, yet Alpine was still “a good 20 seconds in front of us today” and “would have been 25-30s without a safety car.” His verdict was blunt: “We need to put our heads down and make this the new baseline and start improving.”
He also cautioned against treating the result as proof the turnaround is complete. “Not where we want to be. I expect everyone at home to know this is still not where we want to be,” Sainz said. Getting both cars into the points “on merit” was “definitely a good step,” but he said the team still needs months to undo the consequences of its compromised start. “It’s going to take some months to finish the turnaround,” he said. “We’re going to need to get to the last third of the season to see a proper turnaround.”
That timeline matches Vowles’ view that Miami was the start of a development run, not its peak. He said Williams has “more performance coming from Montreal” and that the pipeline remains active with weight reduction, aerodynamic work and vehicle dynamics developments. But he also warned that the picture is relative in a tight midfield, with Mercedes, Audi and possibly Haas all expected to bring updates of their own. “It’s hard to predict that right now,” he said.
For Williams, the significance of Miami was not just three more points. It was confirmation that the delayed package works, that the overweight FW48 can be improved, and that the team’s season now has a recovery path that stretches well beyond this first breakthrough.