Why Williams is still feeling the weight of expectation

Next year Williams celebrates its 50th anniversary, and the team’s history is very much one of unequal halves – the first comprising nine constructors’ championships and seven drivers’ titles, the second a smattering of race wins but very little else. It’s provided a case study for the effects of the competitive inequalities that used to be hard-wired into Formula 1’s commercial structure.

Since 2020 Williams has been owned by the US-based investment group Dorilton Capital, a private equity entity whose ownership is somewhat opaque – as is typical of this line of business – but whose public-facing presence includes 1994 British Formula Renault champion James Matthews, now arguably better-known as brother-in-law to the Prince of Wales.

Among its first moves was to install former Ford and Volkswagen Motorsport boss Jost Capito as CEO and team principal; when he failed to move the needle sufficiently he was replaced by Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles at the end of 2022.

Since then the team’s competitive trajectory has generally tracked upward but, after finishing the 2025 season fifth in the constructors’ standings, Williams endured a rocky entry to the latest set of technical regulations with a car that was late and overweight. And although Vowles played down the long-term significance of missing the pre-season ‘shakedown week’ at Barcelona, the non-appearance of the FW48 there contradicted the narrative of continuous behind-the-scenes improvement.

This was the third time in seven years that build delays had disrupted the team’s plans at a vital part of the season, the last occasion being in 2023, just after Vowles slipped his feet under the executive desk.

Back then, ‘antediluvian’ equipment and working practices were held responsible for falling behind, including the now-famous example of the 20,000-odd components on the car being tracked on an Excel spreadsheet – one which didn’t even include details such as lead times and costs. But that was then and this, indubitably, is now – given the transformation of the business since then, it would be disingenuous to deploy the same rationale for being late again.

Williams started the season in Australia on the back foot in Bahrain test spec

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

To his credit, Vowles didn’t even go there. “I’ve seen elements in 2023. I’ve seen what’s happened this year, and they’re not the same,” he said in the wake of the Barcelona farrago. “The particular one, this year, is the complexity of the car.

“The front wishbone is quite an impressive design and where it is, and how it’s effectively constructed, is pushing the boundaries of what we’ve done before as a business. But we haven’t moved all parts of the business on at the same level and fleshed it out to that level to understand where we’re going to break it. That’s what I’m seeing now at this stage.

“You only know your boundaries by absolutely pushing every boundary possible. I absolutely believe in what I would call intelligent failure. And you get there by effectively pushing the boundaries of what you’re doing. And what we did was exactly that this year.”

“You only know your boundaries by absolutely pushing every boundary possible. I absolutely believe in what I would call intelligent failure” James Vowles

It’s become a hallmark of Vowles’s management style that, in public at least, he paints a picture of these setbacks as necessary and even predictable stress tests for a changing business, and vital opportunities for learning. Witnessing this in progress is like observing a sleeping cat fall off the back of the armchair, contrive to land on all four paws, and then strut away with a purposefully casual gait as if they had meant to do that all along.

“This could have been the best thing that happened to us this winter,” said Vowles at the recent Monaco Grand Prix, “because we needed to expose everything.”

Williams is not alone in having an overweight car, since it has proved extremely difficult to hit the new minimum weight of 768kg – itself very much a watered-down figure from the one initially envisaged by F1’s stakeholders. Only Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Audi were close at the beginning of the year; the others were all over by varying amounts, though it’s understood that figures circulating on various websites were based on speculation rather than inside information.

The team’s ‘race one’ upgrade did not arrive until the Miami GP in May

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

For Williams the problem was compounded by having to strengthen certain components to pass the crash test, principally the nose cone. That meant the upgrade package for the whole season had to be redrawn, so the FW48 appeared in Australia for the opening round as it did in the Bahrain tests, while other teams staged their first updates. The ‘race one’ upgrade was finally applied for May’s Miami GP.

Reducing weight continues to be a focus of development, alongside closing the downforce deficit to the leading teams. In launch spec the FW48 was also too stiffly suspended; compared with many of the other cars on the grid it is quite a high-rake design, though not as extreme as the Aston Martin, so the stiffness is a design choice to reduce compression of the rear axle under load. But this introduces other compromises – in the early races Alex Albon frequently spoke of the car “three-wheeling” through lack of suspension compliance.

It remains a priority for Vowles to rid the production system of delays and bottlenecks, because both of his drivers are out of contract at the end of this year. Their bargaining power is somewhat limited given the absence of frontline options elsewhere, but Vowles is understood to be eager to keep them, describing them as a championship-winning partnership.

Sainz especially is very highly rated in the F1 paddock, dropped by Ferrari only because it sensed an opportunity to bring seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton on board. 

Sainz’s current Williams contract is understood to have options beyond 2026 so he faces a choice between extending that or moving to Audi or Haas, which are the best equivalent teams with potential vacancies next season. So Vowles has faced a battle to keep Sainz onside after the early-season setbacks.

“I know I obviously need to take a decision this year about my future but, at the same time, I’ve made it very clear to Williams and to my management team that my priority is to make this project work, and that I want to,” said Sainz in Canada. “Obviously, this year, we’ve hit a bit of a big bump that we didn’t expect, and now all my attention and all my focus is to try to get this team out of the bump as soon as possible.”

Both Williams drivers are out of contract at the end of this year

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

In Monaco, Sainz was asked about the likelihood of the FW48 getting to where it ought to be, and his response was unequivocal: “I think we acknowledge that fundamentally, even without the weight issue, this car is not good enough for what it could have been or should have been. So I think we acknowledge as a team that we under-delivered not only in terms of weight but also in the performance delivery of the car. We’re obviously having to spend budget cap in bringing weight updates but also downforce updates. 

“Speaking very bluntly, this year we’ve under-delivered in many, many areas. [Has it] tested my faith [in the project]? For sure. When you go from scoring podiums at the end of last year to suddenly being where we were, two and a half seconds off the pace at the beginning of the year, it’s a big test of faith or a big shock to the system. 

“I was the first one to say to James and to the management that it was not expected but at the same time we had very open and clear conversations of where things started going wrong.”

Perhaps more germane to the team’s production issues is the poaching from McLaren of Piers Thynne, one of the lynchpins of the competitive renaissance orchestrated there under Andrea Stella

Williams has continued to make senior hires, though obviously gardening leave means there is a certain inertia between approaches being made, moves being announced, and individuals actually reporting for their new jobs.

Around the Canadian GP weekend Williams announced the imminent arrival of new aero chief Claire Simpson, a Mercedes veteran, along with head of vehicle engineering Steve Booth (formerly of Alpine) and head of performance optimisation Fred Judd (ex-Mercedes-Benz High Performance Powertrains).

Perhaps more germane to the team’s production issues is the poaching from McLaren of Piers Thynne, one of the lynchpins of the competitive renaissance orchestrated there under Andrea Stella.

New recruit Thynne ran factory side of McLaren operation; Vowles rates him highly for his “strategic ability”

As production director and latterly operations director, Thynne was responsible for the factory side of the operation, from production speed and quality to logistics. He was chief operating officer for nearly three years until moving to McLaren’s heritage division, having signalled his intention to move to Williams, where he starts work in July.

“The first conversations I had with him [Thynne] were probably more towards February time so we were in the midst of winter at that point,” said Vowles. “What was clear to me is that the way we are operating is still well and truly off championship level. I’m not talking about just the late car to Barcelona and the weight in the car, just the time it takes us to get an idea to track is far too long and it needs someone that has championship-level understanding of it.

“And the first conversations with him were outstanding; he’s just very strategic in his thinking but he understands how to do the fundamentals of Formula 1 operations.

“F1 operations are a very different beast to anything else in the world. It’s nothing like aerospace, there’s very few things like it in the world where you’re trying to get product to the track in three to four weeks. What I liked with him is the strategic ability. He’ll help us in so many different areas but he also understands what great delivery of product looks like.”

For Thynne it will be something of a spiritual homecoming because his father, Sheridan, was the commercial director of Williams during its halcyon days in the 1980s and early 1990s. Beyond that, Thynne Sr had been a long-standing chum of team founder Frank Williams and had been a member of that 1960s racer gang that included Charles Crichton-Stuart, Piers Courage, Jonathan Williams (no relation) and Charles Lucas.

Sentiment doesn’t generate lap time but, with this unusual link to the team’s history, Vowles hopes to eliminate some of the operational quirks that have stubbornly refused to go away.

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Williams has under-delivered in regard to the car’s weight and performance, reckons Sainz

Photo by: Quinn Rooney / Getty Images