How Williams came out on top in F1's midfield warfare

Formula 1’s midfield battle had a peculiar look to it in 2025. Unless teams were fighting for bigger prizes at the front of the field, the well-documented regulation changes for 2026 soon made the season something of a lame duck project for most aero departments. Given the current budget cap and the prevailing aerodynamic testing restrictions, 2025 was something to be sacrificed on the altar of 2026 while freeing up resources for the new car, which teams were able to start developing in their wind tunnels from January onwards.

Following comments from Williams boss James Vowles that the team was happy to write off 2025 to make a bigger head start on 2026, it was somewhat surprising to see the Grove-based squad emerge as the midfield’s leading force with its FW47. Vowles’s behind-the-scenes overhaul, backed by US-based owner Dorilton, started to yield results even if in-season aero development was kept to a minimum. Unlike its predecessor, the 2025 car was delivered on time and on the weight limit, and the team also placed a big emphasis on a more robust simulation process and intra-department communication as some of the low-hanging fruit that was there for the taking.

That initially manifested itself through Alex Albon, who kicked off the season with fifth in Melbourne and added a few more strings to his bow to single-handedly keep Williams in fifth early on. His new team-mate Carlos Sainz took longer than he had wanted to adjust to his new machinery following his move from Ferrari, but behind the scenes the Spaniard’s value was already clear to see. With his recent top-level experience and technical finesse, Sainz brought a fresh perspective to Williams and ensured the team had two lead drivers rather than one.

“We’ve only put a couple of weeks of aerodynamic development into this year’s car this [calendar] year,” Vowles related in Abu Dhabi. “But what we’ve been working on instead is, ‘Do we have the right balance? Do we have the right way of working the tyres? Do we have the right way of communicating?’ Quite a bit of performance that had been locked away has been coming out of that. And it’s working. Despite the car not changing, we are moving forward.”

That is not to say that Williams got it right every single time – its main limitation of getting its tyres in the right window in qualifying and a few other operational errors showed the team’s growing pains are still flaring up at times. Sainz bore the brunt of that before the summer, while the tables turned in the final third of the season when Albon struggled to convert his underlying pace into solid qualifying results, compromising his weekends. But Sainz picked up the baton to deliver his first two podiums for his new employer, exceeding his own expectations after his unwanted Ferrari exit, while Albon called his eighth place in the drivers’ standings as best of the rest a “mini victory”.

Behind Williams, the competition was so close that the identity of its biggest threat kept fluctuating from week to week, often depending on track-specific strengths and weaknesses, as well as any minor upgrades the midfield teams could muster up.

A solid package and two star drivers gave Williams the tools to win the midfield fight

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Aston Martin and Sauber scored big in Melbourne only to struggle for points in subsequent races, while Haas and Racing Bulls faced opening-round disasters but rebounded quickly. It was the shape of things to come, which ended with all four teams fighting tooth and nail for sixth until the bitter end, with each constructors’ championship position worth approximately $9million.

In Abu Dhabi it was Racing Bulls that secured sixth with 92 points, beating Aston by a mere three. It was a confirmation of the upwards trajectory the Anglo-Italian team has been on after finishing eighth in 2024 and 2023 (as AlphaTauri), and a lowly ninth in 2022. At the time, Red Bull’s second team was told in no uncertain terms by the parent company’s Austrian management that it needed to drastically improve its performance both on the track and on a commercial level, which it has gradually done under the leadership of CEO Peter Bayer and team principal Laurent Mekies. When Mekies moved to Red Bull Racing over the summer to take Christian Horner’s spot, the Frenchman was replaced from within by sporting director Alan Permane.

F2’s 2024 runner-up Isack Hadjar rebounded from a humbling formation-lap spin in Melbourne and developed into 2025’s standout rookie to earn himself Red Bull graduation, while Liam Lawson rehabilitated himself from a bizarrely short two-weekend Red Bull stint to save his F1 career. Hadjar’s crowning achievement was a well-earned podium at Zandvoort’s Dutch Grand Prix, and subsequent major points finishes in Brazil and Las Vegas ensured sixth for the squad.

"We have not been as fast as we were hoping. The AMR24 was tough and challenging and the AMR25 was just its big brother. We are happy to say goodbye to this year" Fernando Alonso

That Racing Bulls managed to outscore the might of Aston Martin was a huge disappointment for the hyper-ambitious team around owner Lawrence Stroll. Designed as a powerhouse to go toe to toe with the likes of Red Bull, which includes poaching the revered Adrian Newey from the squad and snapping up its Honda works power unit programme, Aston’s brand-new Silverstone headquarters should be the place where the magic happens – some of the finest minds in F1 building the superteam of the future. But the state-of-the-art palace is yet to deliver on that lofty promise, and there is a lot of pressure to hit the ground running in 2026, when all its building blocks are in place and the efforts of key Ferrari capture Enrico Cardile, who started in the summer, will begin to become visible. Next year’s car will also be the first fully developed in the team’s new wind tunnel.

But the road to Aston Martin’s harvest season was rocky, as evidenced by strategic disagreements between CEO and team principal Andy Cowell and Newey, who as managing technical partner was effectively Stroll’s right-hand man and therefore de facto the most senior technical figure in the team. At the end of November, it emerged that Cowell was going to step aside into a so-called chief strategy officer role, tasked with focusing on the integration of the new Honda power unit and the team’s fuel and lubricant partnerships with Aramco and Valvoline respectively. The restructure was officially described as a “mutual decision” by Stroll, and means that Newey will become an F1 team principal for the first time in his storied career, although he has vowed not to lose focus of the design work that Stroll hopes will turn his team into world beaters. Under Newey’s technical restructuring, seven other key figures including aero chief Eric Blandin also left or were redeployed.

Meanwhile, Aston’s 2025 performance was little to write home about as it shifted focus in April to 2026, with its car struggling with a lack of aerodynamic efficiency that left it vulnerable on a significant number of circuits, while also suffering in low-speed corners. The long forest-lined straights of Spa were the scene of its mid-summer nadir, with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll qualifying dead last, only for Aston to be the quickest midfield team the following week on the endless twists of the Hungaroring.

Racing Bulls beat the emerging powerhouse at Aston Martin, which is still adjusting to life under Newey's stewardship

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“Obviously, we have not been as fast as we were hoping,” says Alonso. “The AMR24 was tough and challenging and the AMR25 was just its big brother. We are happy to say goodbye to this year.”

With Aston and others struggling, the door was left ajar for Haas to swoop in and have a crack at equalling its best-ever points haul from 2018, when it finished fifth on 93 points. It didn’t quite get there, but the American-owned team showed real signs of progress.

Haas’s season got off to a false start plagued by aerodynamic oscillations in Melbourne. But the squad displayed some much-needed agility by producing a quick fix in time for race three in Japan. It was the precursor to a fully fledged upgrade programme, coming off the back of a couple of years when Haas struggled to add much meaningful in-season performance to its cars, proving to itself that it can deliver on that front.

“Obviously, we started pretty bad,” states team boss Ayao Komatsu. “But I’m really happy with the reaction from that Melbourne disaster to put on a modification in Suzuka – that was amazing. And then we kept developing in that direction, putting proper upgrades on for performance in Silverstone and Austin. These two years in a row just give us lots of confidence that whatever’s thrown at us, if we stick together, we can solve it and put a competitive car out there.”

But Komatsu also argues that the team’s development path should have yielded many more points than it achieved. There are some growing pains involved with bedding in a changed trackside engineering line-up, which the Japanese insisted was the right thing to do, but it still came at a short-term price. Haas was rapid in Belgium, for example, but neither Ollie Bearman nor Esteban Ocon made it into Q3. It was just one of several examples where the team didn’t quite nail its execution in qualifying, which in 2025’s tight midfield was a costly shortcoming to have.

“Mid-season, in terms of operations, we left so many points out there,” Komatsu acknowledges. “That’s why we are where we are. We shouldn’t be having just 79 points. But there are more positives than negatives.”

Haas has also been boosted by Ferrari loanee Bearman’s rapid rise, with the self-critical Briton making his fair share of rookie mistakes but then learning from them to outshine experienced team-mate Ocon, who suffered a series of mystifying braking issues late on. Bearman’s fourth place in Mexico after passing Max Verstappen was both his and Haas’s finest hour.

Bearman's charge to fourth in Mexico was one of the drivers of the season

Photo by: James Sutton / LAT Images via Getty Images

In its last year before transitioning to the Audi works team, Sauber emerged from its lowest ebb in recent history, when it finished last in 2024 and had to wait until the penultimate race in Qatar to score four meagre points. That tally was instantly bettered at the 2025 opener in Australia by ex-Haas driver Nico Hulkenberg, setting the tone for a much-improved campaign.

The Melbourne result initially looked like a false dawn in mixed weather conditions, with Sauber starting the year on the wrong side of a tight midfield skirmish. But a significant floor upgrade for round nine at Barcelona was enough to turn its fortunes around to be in the mix for points at most circuits.

Hulkenberg provided the feel-good moment of the year by claiming a long overdue maiden podium at Silverstone on his 239th start, but the German veteran was also kept on his toes by rapid Brazilian rookie Gabriel Bortoleto. Sauber will be disappointed to be on the wrong side of the fight for sixth and the drop to ninth, but the 70 points it scored is a world away from where it was 12 months ago. Does it make a huge difference? Not on paper, but the Hinwil squad has more of a spring in its step now and will start its Audi journey with a lot more belief. Former Ferrari chief Mattia Binotto is spearheading the project in the background, with ex-Red Bull sporting director Jonathan Wheatley leading the trackside operation as team principal.

Under all-new regulations, F1’s midfield pack looks set to be blown wide open again in 2026

The biggest disappointment of 2025’s midfield battle was Alpine, which started the year at the rear, decided to focus on 2026 very early on and therefore never got the upgrades to do something about its plight. The A525 lacked load and was tricky to drive, and a well-documented weakness from Renault’s engine also cost it chunks of time on power-hungry circuits.

It meant rookie Jack Doohan never got a chance to build momentum before he was axed after six erratic weekends, and his replacement Franco Colapinto couldn’t make much of an impression either. The best part of Alpine’s year was the tenacity its adversity unlocked from lead driver Pierre Gasly, who managed to make it to Q3 on 10 occasions against often superior competition. But the net result is still a distant last, so 2026 can’t come soon enough for Alpine, when it starts a new chapter with Mercedes power while it bids adieu to its French engine plant in Viry.

Under all-new regulations, F1’s midfield pack looks set to be blown wide open again in 2026, so the surreal scene of 15 cars being covered by three tenths in Abu Dhabi Q2 will be a thing of the past – at least for the time being. But, if we learned one thing over the past 12 months, it’s that there are no more bad teams in F1.