Williams’ James Vowles has said he’s prepared to finish lower in the championship rather than risk forgoing preparations for the upcoming F1 2026 regulations changes.
Having spent recent years laying the foundations for a Williams resurgence in 2026, Vowles isn’t being tempted to turn back any resources to this year’s campaign despite the Grove-based squad eying up fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship.
Williams has ‘switched off’ development as F1 2026 in full focus
With 70 points on the board, Williams is 18 points clear of its nearest rival, Aston Martin, as the sport takes a two-week breather for the mandatory summer break.
It’s been an unusual first half of the year for Williams, with the experienced Carlos Sainz having a more difficult start than expected. The Spaniard has scored 16 of the team’s 70 points, with bad luck and misfortune often playing a part in what has been a slow but steady acclimatisation after years of racing for Ferrari.
The FW47 has proven unusually competitive as a tidy racing car, giving Alex Albon the weaponry he’s needed to score a trio of fifth-place finishes, alongside a bevy of other points-scoring results.
But, despite being in fifth place – a position which will add millions in prize money to the team’s coffers over sixth place – the team’s development cycle for the current car has ended and Vowles has insisted he won’t be tempted into restarting any further development on the car, even if he sees fifth place coming under threat due to competitors keeping their development going longer.
“Everything is switched off, it’s already done, it’s decided, and that was done in agreement with the shareholders,” Vowles told media, including PlanetF1.com, immediately prior to the summer shutdown.
“I really enjoy the fact we’re fifth this year, I think it’s a fantastic element for ourselves, our partners, for anyone associated with us, but the goal of this team is to win World Championships, and you’re simply not going to do that by continuing to fight for a position or two in a Constructors’ Championship.
“So that decision was taken in January, and the pathway we’re on is actually this update we did, the element, it wasn’t even guaranteed we would update. There were a few bits that we did with the tunnel across January, February, and March. That’s it.
“We’re not doing anything more. I won’t do anything more. If that results in us being sixth in the championship, so be it.”
F1 2026 has long been identified as a primary target for Williams to aim for as rejoining as a primary competitor, with Vowles overseeing a long rebuilding and modernisation of a team that had slumped to the back of the field through a lack of resources and capital infrastructure.
Fifth place would be the team’s highest-place finish since 2017, then under the ownership of the Williams family.
Vowles confirmed the FW47 of 2025 has seen minimal development time in the wind tunnel, with only a raft of upgrades introduced at Spa differentiating the car significantly since the pre-season, with the 2026 FW48 being in for “nearly every single hour we could” since aero testing restrictions for 2026 lifted at the start of January this year.
But that isn’t necessarily the same approach taken by all the midfield teams. For instance, Haas has already confirmed further upgrades will come for its VF-25 later this season, and Williams risks falling further back if other teams bring more speed to their cars this year.
The British team boss said he doubts Haas will be the only midfield rival to bring performance developments over the remainder of this year, but it’s not something he’s worrying himself about.
“What I’m hearing up and down the grid… if you put yourself in my shoes, what am I fighting against? I’m reflective of how we perform in any one given year,” he said.
“That is my job… to make sure we perform, which is why I signed off at the investor board level immediately that this is not what we’re doing. We agreed and signed off for that, so I won’t be adjudicated by where we finish in this year’s championship.
“It’ll still hurt me, but I won’t be adjudicated by that.
“I’ll be adjudicated by how we move this team forward year on year, relative to measure. But that isn’t the same up and down the grid.
“There are a lot of other entities where it is about now, and I think that’s one that differentiates us.”
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F1 2025 indicative of Williams’ progress
Much was made, two years ago, about how Williams’ infrastructure was not of the standard of many of its grid rivals, with Vowles having moved over to Grove from a senior management role at Mercedes.
For instance, investor and parts management was done via Excel spreadsheets, a relic of yesteryear long left behind by F1’s leading teams.
But Williams has been a team on the rise under Vowles’ stewardship, with full trust placed in him by owners Dorilton Capital.
Reflecting on where he feels he’s managed to bring about change at Williams, Vowles denied that he feels he’s turned the team around from its calamitous years of strife at the back of the grid.
“I don’t think we’ve turned around. I think we’re generally moving the right way,” he said.
“The main thing is this – last year, the car was very heavy. We didn’t have the right amount of spare parts.
“We effectively threw a lot of technology through in terms of ideas, but could not deliver on the back end.
“One of the biggest fixes we’ve put in place in the last 24 months is making sure we can deliver from what we call concept to track as quickly as possible, at the right cost level, and that’s one of the biggest changes.
“You can see that with this car, it was on time, and we have plenty of spares around us. We can develop multiple updates across the year.
“We’ve done multiple front wings, multiple packages. That’s a change if you look back at Williams’ history; that’s been one of the key changes. So on the weight limit, the right product at the right time.
“Secondary are KPIs that aren’t as exciting to the outside world because only I can see them. But what I’m looking at is, fundamentally, how much we can push through our organisation and our factory on any given week.
“So, whether that’s in production or design effectively, how many releases can we do in a week? How many of those can we push through production in a week? How much do we push externally, and we’re in a much better place in a cost cap world.
“It now gives me more money to make sure we build the organisation and fix the organisation. We don’t use Excel spreadsheets anymore. I joked about it two years ago. I was joking at the time, but we’re now in a situation of using modern-day ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] and PLM [Product Lifecycle Management] tools in order to design and build the car. That’s a big change.
“There are more changes this week that helped us again for our future.”
Given that the focus has been primarily on long-term growth and putting in place the building blocks for future success, is Vowles surprised that a team that hasn’t been focused on the here-and-now is, in said here-and-now, achieving the best-of-the-rest results behind the top four squads?
“I reflect on our season this year, and we’ve had elements where we’ve delivered, and, when we’ve delivered, it’s delivered well, as a result of a number of iterational cars in front of us,” he said.
“The car, going into the year, if you asked me, I would say it’s going to be a very close battle between P5 all the way down to probably P8, which I think is the reflection of it.
“I think, if you look at our performance up until Imola and Miami, you would say, yeah, the car is fifth because we’re picking up good results, we’re not making any mistakes.
“But the field was very compact. Then, in Imola and Miami, I think we took the world a little bit by surprise as to how far we could push this car and develop the car.
“Then the development race kicked in, and others have added performance. Ferrari has done a brilliant job in that regard. It was our update at Spa that brought us back into a position where we’re again able to get the cars in the top 10. That’s my assessment of it.
“Am I surprised with it? I think any team could have had fortunate results on the way through. We did a good job when the car was quick and we’ve been able to pick up the points that we could best.”
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