The work Williams must do in Bahrain to avoid starting F1 2026 behind

And that makes 11...almost.

Williams has unveiled its FW48 livery for Formula 1 2026, complete with a sky-blue splodge to house its new sponsorship arrangement with Barclays, on a version of a current-generation car. I like the commitment to the azure hue, very much an upgrade over the dark-to-royal blue gradient deployed on the previous James Vowles-era cars - but you're not here for sartorial musings, I suspect.

We can't really work through the car as we've done for the other launch models since, now we've seen actual 2026 cars on the track, we have a general idea of what to expect. In short, there's bits missing - for example, how can I point out the pushrod or pullrod suspension if neither are even present? Maybe Williams has come up with an innovative new way to operate the torsion bars without them - magnets perhaps, or through Vowles simply explaining to the rockers how they need to function, asking them to join the team on its journey, and informing them that their predecessors were fabricated by Bronze Age-tooling.

Maybe new 'official thinking partner' Anthropic has developed a way to get the suspension members to think for themselves using Claude's AI platform, only for them to stop operating as a link to an unsprung mass and instead turn to plagiarising text from well-known literature. That would be the extractive suspension...not a very good punchline, admittedly, but I needed an out.

In any case, since there's crucial suspension members missing from the visuals, it's not really worth getting out the drawing tablet to scrawl out some notes in barely legible all-caps handwriting. I'm not even convinced the tyres are the right width.

Williams, led by Vowles, has been pretty consistent with its "focus on 2026" mantra. Even when 2025's FW47 turned out to be a pretty handy car, one that enacted the ascent up to fifth in the championship after years of pootling around at the back, Vowles wanted the wind tunnel work to be wrapped up sharpish to get the '26 car through its development programme. Thus, it seemed incongruous that the team did not turn up to the Barcelona shakedown at all, given the apparent wealth of time that it had carved out in binning off last season's development.

A new sky-blue-on-blue livery for Williams, which sticks to the brighter shades

Photo by: Williams

There were comparisons drawn to 2019 when Williams rocked up late to the first Barcelona test, and proceeded to have a dreadful season. But there's a clear difference here; at that time, the team was very much circling the drain financially, and the team invested too much time developing 'radical' details that were ultimately not in keeping with the technical regulations. The build quality of that year's FW42 was, to put it charitably, questionable. There were very few spares available too, to the point where George Russell and Robert Kubica were asked to under-drive to avoid putting undue stress on the manufacturing department.

Of course, we can't vouch for the FW48 yet, because it's not been seen in the open. What we do know is that delays have pushed Williams' running back, and thus places a lot of additional work on the Grove squad's shoulders in Bahrain.

In lieu of this, Williams' virtual track testing (VTT) programme at least ensured that the car could run - albeit in a laboratory environment, rather than a real one. The FW48 was hooked up to a series of dynamometers, multi-post rigs, extractor fans, and machines that go 'ping' to replicate some of the testing conditions. With this, the team could iron out some of the more immediate creases that are generally present in any box-fresh machinery.

"The top of the priority list for me is we have not got a characterisation of our aerodynamic package, or our vehicle dynamics package for suspension. You can do everything in a rig world, in a simulation world, but you need to have it properly characterised and correlated" James Vowles

"I would much prefer to have been in Barcelona. I'm going to pre-empt all that," explained Vowles on the day Williams launched its livery. "That was the goal. That was what we were intending to do. We did not achieve it. However, what we did in terms of a week worth of VTT testing that was successful and what we've been doing with both Carlos [Sainz] and Alex [Albon] on the driver-in-loop simulator in tandem while everyone else was in Barcelona.

"In addition, and we are fortunate to the fact that Mercedes has sufficient runners that there's quite a bit of information coming back on both the gearbox and the power unit that enables us to get ahead when we come to Bahrain, means that I do not believe with six days of testing we'll be on the back foot. Now a little bit of that's fortune because the engine, the power unit is reliable, the gearbox is reliable and the VTT testing flushed out a lot of the demons that are buried in the car.

"What's missing is there's a lot of knowledge for the drivers to inherently perfect what's going on track. What's missing is a correlation for where our aerodynamics really are and a correlation for where our vehicle dynamics really are. So track data is the only way of establishing that."

"One regular day of Barclays. That's all I ask for." Williams must hope it can sustain the interest of its new banking partner

Photo by: Williams

Both Albon and Sainz have been logging the virtual miles in Williams' brand-new simulator, on which shareholders Dorilton Capital have placed sufficient outlay on following Vowles' demand for greater capital expenditure. This will help mitigate some of the pain taken from not running at Barcelona, but it's never a substitute for the real thing - even for all the millions of pounds pumped into making it as relevant as possible. It should give the drivers the right ballpark to operate within for 2026's new driving challenges, particularly with the active aero and overtake tools, but it won't detail the other little quirks only seen with another car in front.

And, without running, you don't get the opportunity to validate your design. Running the car on a full rig is, in essence, akin to testing your aerodynamics on a wind tunnel; you see the car doing its thing, and it gives you numbers which may or may not correlate with the computer-aided simulation packages. But, if the machinery testing the car has a margin of error, it can lead you up the wrong garden path - and you might have already forgotten the exact plots in which you'd planted the hydrangeas.

The validation work - assuming everything works reliably - will thus have to take place on the opening days in Bahrain. That detracts from the time spent on performance-led running, and identifying a band of set-up options that work for these 2026 cars. Although the operating envelopes should be wider, given that the floor is no longer beholden to running within an 8mm range of ride heights, the trackside team must hone in on the sweet spots for the FW48.

"The top of the priority list for me is we have not got a characterisation of our aerodynamic package, or our vehicle dynamics package for suspension," Vowles added. "You can do everything in a rig world, in a simulation world, but you need to have it properly characterised and correlated in order to be able to ensure that you haven't taken the wrong turn somewhere. That's the biggest missing piece. I'm not worried about the driver load.

"There is definitely more driver load. It's a very different way of driving the car or using the electrical systems. I'm not worried about that. We've replicated that very well in our simulators.

"We invested tens of millions in that facility and every track is so different that the specifics of Barcelona don't necessarily carry on through into Bahrain or Melbourne, but it's that characterisation and making sure that there's no nasty surprises. If there's not, then it probably won't be too nasty, but if there's anything, then it puts us on the back foot by a week or so."

Team principal James Vowles put a lot of stock into 2026's project

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

There's a lot of work for Williams to do, and only six days to do it within. Vowles spoke about stress-testing the design departments with the 2024 car, and it does appear that those stress tests have continued; the new car is apparently three-times more complex than the last (although I don't quite know how you quantify that: does it come with an SI unit?) and it's put the team's infrastructure under a lot more pressure to produce something that works effectively.

It's funny; folks want short-term solutions to long-term problems but, sometimes, things just take a bit longer to mature. For now, we'll reserve judgement - lest we contribute to the fast-fashion world in which we live.

Williams will just hope that its sacrifices over the past two years for the 2026 project won't be in vain.