The start of the Formula 1 season has brutally exposed the extent of Williams’s car problems, and one that blighted Alex Albon’s Chinese Grand Prix might be its most troubling.
After turning up to testing late, being significantly overweight after all, and then unsurprisingly turning out slow as a result, the Williams FW48 has had a difficult birth.
But as Albon said in China, “we can’t hide behind the weight”. There are other issues hurting Williams – “some weird stuff going on in the car”, Albon said, after a weekend in which multiple set-up changes did not help and reliability problems after a gearbox change meant he did not even start Sunday’s grand prix.
“Nothing seems to fix the car,” he said.
“The biggest issue at the minute is the car three-wheeling, so we just need to fix it.”
Three-wheeling is when the car lifts one tyre off the ground in a corner, usually the inside rear. It is not always fully detached from the ground but can give that sensation if the suspension brings the wheel up such that it is significantly unloaded.
The effect is the car running with a reduced contact patch across the four wheels that reduces mechanical grip but also disrupts its aerodynamic platform. This means the car can lack grip and be unpredictable.
Identifying a specific cause depends on the exact circumstances but excessive roll stiffness and aggressive ride height could be factors during high load transfer. Perhaps this Williams, which has a high rake design for 2026 and has looked stiff ever since pre-season testing, does not work in reality as it expected from simulation.
“There’s a lot of balance issues in the car,” said Albon. “We aren’t seeing some downforce as well, so it’s an accumulation of things.
“The weight’s one thing. There’s also plans kind of in conjunction with the weight loss to get the car a bit in balance and also at downforce quicker.”
What is interesting is this is not the first time Albon or Williams have talked about such a phenomenon. A well-established weakness for the team has been getting its car to behave predictably in long corners, especially when combined braking and lateral load come into play. Straightline braking has been fine, combination entries less so.
In the past, Williams has felt that its suspension was not compliant enough to give Albon the strong front end he wants in long-duration, medium-speed corners. It would start lifting up the inside rear wheel. This can be locked with the differential to avoid too much slip but then that in turn can cause understeer.
It is a hard situation to unpick unless there is an obvious fault somewhere. Albon had suggested on Sunday in China that one of the frustrations about not taking the start from the pitlane was that the team seemed to have found something in its overnight changes but in the context of everything else, this seemed to be said more in hope than expectation.
Williams is probably one of the teams most relieved by April containing no races. It needs to get through Japan next weekend and then it has a month to make as much progress as possible through what Albon called an “enormous” list of issues, given there is the weight limit, an apparent underlying mechanical platform issue, and reliability problems on both cars blighting its opening weekends.
Though it was Albon who was worst-affected in China, as Carlos Sainz managed an unlikely points finish in ninth in a race of high attrition, the reality is that neither driver can go into a race weekend at the moment with much confidence.
“We know we are too slow and we are too slow compared to where we wanted to be, compared to where we expected to be,” Sainz said.
“Part of that is weight that we know we need to get out of the car but another part, a very big part of it, is downforce that we need to improve. We haven’t been the most reliable car also.
“Honestly we need to level up because we’re having too many issues in too many areas and as a team, we need to dig deep.
“I hope these two points serve as motivation, as a bit of a bonus motivation for everyone to go back home and dig deep because it’s not where we wanted to be and where we said we would be this season.”