{"id":748912,"date":"2026-06-20T06:19:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T06:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/748912\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T06:19:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T06:19:14","slug":"what-went-wrong-at-williams-and-can-it-salvage-its-2026-f1-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/748912\/","title":{"rendered":"What went wrong at Williams? And can it salvage its 2026 F1 season?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By most measures, Williams<\/a> has endured an incredibly underwhelming 2026 season so far, and the Barcelona<\/a> weekend added to its misery on a circuit that, historically, hasn\u2019t favoured its car in a long while.<\/p>\n

Team boss James Vowles, speaking days after the race, labelled it a \u201cblip in what is the season\u201d after Williams<\/a>\u2018 three-race streak of point-scoring finishes ended as Alex Albon retired and Carlos Sainz<\/a> finished in 12th, two laps down.<\/p>\n

Williams<\/a> left Spain still eighth in the constructors\u2019 championship, on 11 points, nearly half of what Haas<\/a>, the team ahead, has scored so far.<\/p>\n

It is a damning situation when set against where Williams was supposed to be after a strong 2025 in which the Grove team had often become the best-of-the-rest behind the top four.<\/p>\n

This was meant to be the year Vowles\u2019 rebuild finally pushed Williams a step closer to becoming a real contender again.<\/p>\n

Seven races in, Williams is closer to the bottom of the table than the top of it, and the gap to the cars they\u2019re nominally racing against is not closing.<\/p>\n

\"Carlos<\/p>\n

Williams ran closer to the back in Barcelona<\/p>\n

\n Grand Prix Photo\n <\/p>\n

Despite having scored points in the three previous races before Spain, Barcelona wasn\u2019t an outlier dropped into an otherwise solid year.<\/p>\n

Vowles\u2019 own account of the season is, in fact, reasonably accurate: Williams had three solid weekends in Miami, Canada and Monaco where the team scored points, building something that looked, briefly, like momentum.<\/p>\n

Barcelona broke that, but it didn\u2019t break it randomly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis isn\u2019t a new phenomenon \u2013 it\u2019s happened to Williams many times across our history,\u201d Vowles said. \u201cThe last race I recall where we were truly strong in Barcelona was back in 2012, and I think even then some characteristics of the car may have helped in those specific conditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are elements that are simply baked into ways of working and ways of thinking about the car as a complete concept \u2014 and a lot of that is, I think, directionally wrong for Barcelona. We\u2019ve accentuated that this year through a difficult winter that left the car in a less-than-ideal specification. That made things worse, but it isn\u2019t the underlying root cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sainz had flagged before the race that the FW48\u2019s medium-speed, long-duration corners were a known weakness, with Williams not having reached Q3 in Barcelona since 2017, a stat that turns Vowles\u2019 claim of long-term vulnerability from spin into something closer to a documented fact.<\/p>\n

How Williams got here<\/p>\n

It has been well documented that Williams\u2019 car has been overweight since the start of pre-season testing, but its problems go far beyond a heavy car.<\/p>\n

\"Alexander<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019 car is still quite overweight<\/p>\n

\n Grand Prix Photo\n <\/p>\n

Sainz said the deficit through medium- and high-speed corners was partly down to weight, but more significantly down to a lack of downforce relative to rivals \u2014 calling it a realisation that Williams is much further from its target than expected, and that it was time to go back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t call it shock, not even a wake-up call, because we knew it, but a realisation that we are very far from where we should be, where we targeted to be, or where we want to be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I think it\u2019s time to go back to the drawing board and start bringing more things to the car, because clearly in a medium-speed track we are very far.\u201d<\/p>\n

While weight is a known quantity with a known fix, a downforce shortfall relative to the competition is a concept-level problem, the kind that doesn\u2019t get solved with diet, only with a new aerodynamic direction.<\/p>\n

Sainz, who finished 12th in Barcelona after what he called a solid performance from him, was blunt about the prospects of making real progress towards the front, even with updates.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know what\u2019s coming, and for sure, normally in this team, upgrades really tend to work,\u201d he added. \u201cBut at the same time, I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s enough to cut the gap that we have in these sort of tracks. We need to do more than what we are doing already.\u201d<\/p>\n

His comments go in the opposite direction of his team principal calling the same weekend a \u201cblip\u201d.<\/p>\n

None of this means Vowles is lying, of course. It\u2019s entirely possible both things are true at once: that Barcelona is a genuine outlier in terms of where on the calendar Williams\u2019 weaknesses get punished hardest, while also being an accurate signal of a real and current performance deficit that isn\u2019t going away by Silverstone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Carlos<\/p>\n

Sainz finished the Barcelona race two laps down<\/p>\n

\n Grand Prix Photo\n <\/p>\n

In any case, it does sound like the driver is more pessimistic than his boss about what the season has been like for Williams.<\/p>\n

Strip away the spin and there is a genuine piece of engineering reasoning in what Vowles said that deserves to be taken on its own terms.<\/p>\n

His explanation of why Barcelona specifically punishes Williams is more sophisticated than \u2018the track doesn\u2019t suit us\u2019: he described a lap built from a predictable sequence \u2014 braking, entry, apex, exit, traction \u2014 and argued that Barcelona exposes a weakness anywhere in that chain in a way that a more forgiving circuit wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve definitely accentuated that this year by some of the winter that\u2019s been difficult but left this car in not the ideal circumstance in terms of specification,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that\u2019s just a fact that we have to remove, so I think that\u2019s an element that made it even worse again but isn\u2019t really the underlying fault underneath it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That checks out with the on-track reality: this isn\u2019t a one-year problem, and Williams\u2019 Barcelona struggles long predate the 2026 regulations.<\/p>\n

Where Williams\u2019 situation gets harder to defend is the framing around timing, as the team continues to run an overweight car a quarter of the season in.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The recovery roadmap<\/p>\n

The recovery plan Vowles laid out has real structure to it, and it\u2019s not just a \u2018trust-the-process\u2019 narrative that team bosses often offer as explanation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a good performance pipeline coming. There will be some elements around Silverstone, maybe pushing into Spa, there will be some elements as we go towards the August break and quite a lot as we go past the August break, where we will bring really quite a new car to the track.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"James<\/p>\n

Vowles insists there is still time to recover<\/p>\n

\n Williams\n <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a granular answer and it at least gives something concrete to hold him to later in the season.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow that feels like a long way off and it feels like it\u2019s late in the season,\u201d he added. \u201cThe reality is we are only one third of the way through the season now and even post-August break, you\u2019ll still have nine races or so left to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fair point on the calendar. Whether it\u2019s a fair point on the championship is a separate question.<\/p>\n

The numbers behind his reassurance deserve closer scrutiny rather than simply being taken at face value.<\/p>\n

Williams sits eighth in the constructors\u2019 championship on 11 points after seven races.<\/p>\n

The team needs to roughly double its points-per-race average just to stay in contention for the midfield fight, and several of those seven races came on circuits that were historically kinder to the FW47\u2019s characteristics than what lies ahead on the calendar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By most measures, Williams has endured an incredibly underwhelming 2026 season so far, and the Barcelona weekend added…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82,1196],"class_list":["post-748912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}