Williams team principal James Vowles acknowledged disappointment at missing last week’s Barcelona Shakedown but insisted the squad will not start 2026 on the “back foot.” The Grove outfit were the only team absent from the opening pre-season event after delays with the FW48 programme, deciding instead to keep pursuing performance gains before hitting the track.
While rivals completed on-track runs, Williams ran an intensive private virtual testing programme. The team also used its driver-in-loop simulator with Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon working in tandem, running scenarios and setups ahead of the official sessions in Bahrain later this month.
“Of course I would have preferred to be in Barcelona — that was our plan,” Vowles said at the team’s livery launch. “We didn’t make it, but the week of virtual testing was productive, and the driver-in-loop work we did with Carlos and Alex has put us in a strong position.”
He added that having access to information from Mercedes, particularly on gearbox and power unit behaviour, has helped close the gap created by the missed track time. That data, combined with reliable power units and gearboxes and the virtual programme revealing many issues, is why Vowles believes six days of official testing in Bahrain will be sufficient to get the team race-ready.
Vowles did concede there are unavoidable limits without real-world laps. “What we don’t have is the on-track correlation for our aerodynamics and vehicle dynamics — you only get that from mileage,” he said. “There’s a loss from not being on track, but our simulator investment is state-of-the-art and allows us to mitigate a lot of that before we arrive in Bahrain.”
Reflecting on progress since his arrival in early 2023, Vowles highlighted Williams’ rise to fifth in the most recent Constructors’ Championship as a positive step, but warned that moving up to fourth will be much harder. “The jump from fifth to fourth is, in my experience, exponentially more difficult than what we’ve already achieved,” he said. “Beating teams that are also developing requires pushing boundaries and being brave with decisions.”
He tempered expectations about title contention, describing 2025 as the team’s new established baseline and emphasising steady year-on-year development as the objective. With Melbourne and the early part of the season still uncertain — teams will bring different parts and the development race will shape the order — Vowles said the focus remains clear: close the gap quickly, arrive in Bahrain with confidence, and keep progressing.
“Our priority is to push hard, catch up where we can, and go to Bahrain with our heads held high,” he said. “We’ve invested in tools and gathered useful data; now it’s about turning that into lap time and continuing to move the business forward.”