By Thomas Birkbeck
There was genuine optimism surrounding Williams heading into 2026. After years of struggle that bottomed out with a pointless 2020 season, the team’s rebuild under team principal James Vowles had quietly and steadily gathered momentum. Williams enjoyed one of the strongest seasons in their recent F1 history in 2025, rising to fifth in the constructors’ championship, their highest placing since 2017, and returning to the podium with Carlos Sainz. After that, the new regulations cycle felt like the perfect moment to make another leap forward. Instead, three races into the 2026 season, Williams find themselves in a very different conversation entirely.
The warning signs emerged before the season even began. Williams had a bumpy start to 2026 after opting not to take part in the Barcelona shakedown in late January due to delays in production, meaning all ten rival teams completed running in Spain while Williams sat on the sidelines. Team principal Vowles was characteristically candid about why, framing the delay as an aggressive development push rather than a failure. “Only by pushing the boundaries can you find the pain points and put them right, which is exactly what we’re doing,” he said. “I’m not here to produce a car that’s well and truly within the tolerances. We have to push ourselves as a business to breaking point and we’ve done so. It’s painful but it means we will never be here again.” The ambition is admirable. The execution, at least early in the season, has been painful.
Williams completed 4,275km across both Bahrain pre-season tests, ranking ninth out of ten teams. For context, Mercedes led all teams with 6,193km, with Haas, Ferrari and McLaren all completing more than 5,700km. Williams missed the equivalent of roughly a third of the mileage of the leading teams.The conversation around the FW48 quickly became dominated by one word: weight. It is believed the 2026 challenger is in the region of 20 to 25 kilograms overweight, though an exact figure has not been confirmed. In a formula where ballpark estimates suggest 10 kilograms equates to roughly three tenths of a second per lap, the implications are severe.
Yet Albon has been careful not to use weight as the catch-all explanation for the team’s difficulties. “We cannot hide behind the weight because, at the end of the day, there are other cars that are up on weight also,” he explained. “Definitely not as much as we are, but they’re still overweight, and the deficit to these teams is not just that. There are a lot of balance issues in the car. We haven’t seen the downforce as well, so it’s an accumulation of things.” That admission is arguably the more concerning element. Downforce shortfall and balance problems are not fixed overnight, and Albon’s words after Chinese Grand Prix qualifying painted a stark picture. “At the minute, nothing we’re doing seems to fix the cars,” he said. “We’re going in areas that we’ve never been before and, to be honest, we’ll keep going and getting more steps from that. Nothing seems to fix the car.”
On track, the results have reflected those limitations. The season-opening Australian Grand Prix resulted in 12th and 15th-place finishes for Albon and Sainz, respectively. In China, the Williams cars were eliminated from Q1 in qualifying, with Sainz falling just under two tenths shy of progressing into Q2 and Albon an unhappy 18th. Albon also failed to start the Chinese Grand Prix itself due to a hydraulic problem. After two races, Albon sat among the drivers yet to score a single championship point. For a team that finished fifth in the constructors’ championship just months ago, the contrast is jarring.
Ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, there were brief flickers of encouragement. In the second practice session, Albon showed genuine pace, climbing to eighth on the timesheets and suggesting that the high-speed demands of the circuit might suit the FW48 better than the street-circuit-influenced layouts that preceded it. But qualifying on Saturday brought Williams back down to earth. Sainz made it past Q1 for the first time this season, qualifying 16th, while Albon was eliminated in Q1 in 17th, knocked out by Alpine’s Franco Colapinto in the dying moments of the session. Albon took to team radio to enquire as to where he had lost out to his team-mate, before cryptically stating: “I complain for three races in a row that there’s something wrong. But I’m sure it’s my driving style.” The comment, left largely unexplained in the post-session media, speaks to a driver growing increasingly frustrated with the tools at his disposal.
As one analysis noted, the regression at Williams has been a genuine shock given the team’s strong 2025. Last year saw the Grove outfit jump from ninth to fifth in the championship with its first multi-podium season since 2015. But it has come crashing back down to earth, despite team boss James Vowles repeatedly saying in the build-up that all work was being done for a strong 2026.
The 2026 regulation reset was meant to be a leveller, and in several areas of the grid it has been, which only makes Williams’ position more uncomfortable by comparison. The midfield battle remains extremely tight after the opening two rounds, with Alpine and Audi among those registering points. Haas in particular has emerged as a genuine surprise package, with Ollie Bearman impressing consistently and the team sitting fourth in the constructors’ standings after China. Pierre Gasly put the Alpine at the head of the midfield in China across both qualifying sessions, with Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson also scoring points in both the sprint and the grand prix. These are the teams Williams would expect to be fighting directly. At present, that fight is not happening.
Former Formula 1 driver and analyst Jolyon Palmer was blunt in his assessment, describing Williams as emerging as one of the “biggest disappointments” of the early 2026 season. “It’s going wrong across the board,” he said. “Weight is the thing we’ve spoken about already at length, but there’s a lot of things that are not working properly on that car. They don’t have downforce. The weight is an issue. Procedurally, there are a few things that are not tidy. And then Carlos had reliability issues as well.” After two weekends, only Cadillac and Aston Martin sit alongside Williams without a point. Given that Aston Martin is grappling with a brand new Honda power unit and Cadillac is a first-year constructor, the company Williams is keeping at the bottom of the table is not where this team envisioned itself.
Not all of the picture is bleak. Vowles has been consistent and transparent throughout, and the team has a credible plan to reduce the weight of the FW48 progressively across the opening races. Sainz himself acknowledged the frustration while identifying a silver lining: “The car is running reliably from the beginning. That’s allowing us, obviously, to find out the limitations and the areas where we have to improve.” Albon also maintained his faith in the team. “We know what it takes to get back, we’re more prepared to get back as well, and we just have to wait. But for now, we are clearly a good chunk behind.”
The 2026 formula is still in its infancy, and with the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix cancelled due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, the season’s next round is not until Miami in May. That five-week break, while painful commercially, may prove to be exactly what Williams need to regroup and return with a meaningfully improved car. Three seasons into Vowles’ tenure, the question is no longer where Williams has come from, but how convincingly they can justify where they say they are going. That reckoning has arrived sooner than expected. The answer, right now, is complicated. But the season is long, and Williams have proven before that they are capable of surprising people.
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