Racing
© Ragnar Beaverson
Williams’ double points finish in Miami gave the team its first real evidence that a five-week recovery plan is working, with Carlos Sainz ninth and Alexander Albon 10th after a winter that left the FW48 badly overweight and off the midfield pace.
The result mattered because Williams had started 2026 on the back foot. After three races it had only two points, sat ninth in the constructors’ standings and was running a car estimated at around 28kg, and by some accounts nearly 30kg, above the new 768kg minimum. That deficit was costing major lap time, with the overweight alone described as worth around a second per lap at the start of the season.
Miami was the first weekend where the team’s response showed up clearly on track. Williams arrived with a broad package that included floor changes, bodywork revisions around the engine cover and sidepods, cooling adjustments, rear-end work and some weight reduction. The gain was enough to move the team from the rear of the midfield into the points with both cars.
James Vowles, Williams team principal, said the cancelled Bahrain and Saudi Arabian grands prix gave the team the reset it needed after what he called a messy winter. “The break gave us an opportunity to reset, take a breath, catch up, form a plan for not just Miami, but really what we’re doing now across everywhere up until the end of the season to put ourselves back into a sensible position,” he said.
He said the winter problems went well beyond one late update. Williams had introduced major changes to its systems and working methods, including ERP and PLM tools, and the FW48 was the first full car build under that structure. Vowles said mistakes in software and planning only became obvious once the system was under pressure. At the same time, Williams pushed to keep wind-tunnel development going for as long as possible, then had to build what he described as its most complex car yet, with roughly twice the number of parts and much greater overall complexity.
The consequences stacked up. Some crash tests were difficult, delays spread through production, and Vowles said that when time starts to run out, adding weight becomes the easiest way to get parts into a safe working state. The result was a heavy car that missed pre-season time and began the year chasing rivals instead of racing them.
Even so, Williams says the underlying weight problem is already solved in engineering terms. Vowles said the team has removed all of the excess weight on paper, “and even 10 kilos on top of that,” but most of those gains are not yet on the car. In Miami, the saving was only “a couple of kilos.”
That slow rollout is deliberate. Under the cost cap, Williams does not want to spend money producing lighter versions of parts that are near the end of their life cycle if those parts would soon be replaced anyway. Vowles said it makes more sense to combine weight reduction with aerodynamic updates, as the team did with its new floor in Miami, rather than build the same components again just to save mass.
He was upbeat after the race in comments to DAZN, saying: “I’m very happy. It has been five hard weeks where we kept our heads down. We have brought a lot of performance, we are moving in the right direction, I’m happy, this is only the beginning.” He added that more performance should arrive “in practically every race until the break.”
Vowles also made clear that Miami is not the benchmark Williams will judge itself by. “The gap is so large,” he said, that this was only a small step, and the team’s real target is where the FW48 stands once development ends after the August break. That is when he wants Williams “back to being the top of the midfield,” which would turn Miami from a promising weekend into proof that the team has genuinely climbed out of its winter hole.