F1 boss admits failings over 'painful' 2026 car struggle

Wolff looking at Vowles with pride as Vowles looks away, both sat next to each other on the FIA press conference sofa — Photo: © IMAGO

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F1 boss admits failings over 'painful' 2026 car struggle

Williams are down in eighth in the constructors' championship

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Monday 4 May 2026 16:56

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Williams F1 team principal James Vowles has issued a passionate statement about Williams' 2026 issues.

Since missing the first pre-season testing event of the year in Barcelona, Williams haven't really recovered, and prior to the Miami Grand Prix last weekend, only managed to score two points across the opening three rounds of the season.

The Grove-based outfit picked up three points on Sunday in Miami after both drivers finished in the points for the first time in 2026, but considering they finished fifth in last year's constructors' championship and were hoping to gain on the top four teams with the new regulations, this year has been a huge disappointment for them so far.

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They have struggled with an overweight car, which Vowles himself admitted is more than 20kg above the minimum weight limit.

It has led to frustration for their talented driver pairing Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon, with Sainz berating the team's lack of improvement during sprint qualifying at the Miami Grand Prix.

In Miami, Vowles also produced an explanation for why Williams are struggling quite so much.

While the plights of new team Cadillac and Adrian Newey's Aston Martin have taken some of the attention away from Williams, there's no doubt that their start to the season has also been disastrous.

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Vowles' full explanation of Williams' 2026 struggles

"We made a lot of changes a few years ago, putting in ERP, PLM systems, different ways of doing planning, different ways of structuring, different ways of working, and this was the first proper car build where all of those brought into account," Vowles explained to media in Miami.

"I think we have made some mistakes on some of that software that we’ve been using. It was our first proper go at planning a completely new regulation car from start to finish. And when we went through effectively a global review of all of that, it’s tiny, small details but hundreds of them starting to add up. So, there were just inefficiencies across the board that weren’t taken into account and only came to light once you started stressing the system.

"Whilst we started early in the wind tunnel, no doubt about that, we did not start the build of the car early because what you want to do is keep all of that goodness in the wind tunnel as long as possible and we wanted to stress ourselves to the point of not quite a championship team but more aggressive than we had done before."

Vowles continued: "The car we produced is the most complex. It doesn’t matter if I use number of parts, it’s about two times the number of parts. Doesn’t matter if I only use the number of parts in the chassis or the time it took, all of it was about one and a half to two times more complex and it didn’t go smoothly through much of that process.

"And your reaction, it might not seem this way, but your reaction once that starts to happen is there is very few alternatives. You can’t really go to outside manufacturers because they are all booked up by other individuals. So, once you start falling behind, you’re in trouble. There was a number of crash tests but some were passed incredibly well, some were difficult, frankly, and that put load back into a system at a very difficult point as well.

"Once you start running out of time, weight is quite an easy addition to effectively get a part through to make sure that you are in a sensible place. It comes basically into a heavy car very quickly as a result.

“'Why does it take so long to get the weight out?’ As I said, the engineering’s work is done, so the designers aren’t designing, fundamentally. But you have to make sure you’re printing the components in a way that makes sense. So, in other words, we could take out, and we have this weekend, several kilos out of the floor because we’ve done a new floor. I don’t want to just make exactly the same front wing being several kilos lighter. That doesn’t make any sense to anyone. So, you’ve got to body that into an aerodynamic update at the same time. And so that’s the efficient way in cost cap of doing it.

"We could right now take out, if there’s no cost cap, print the other bits in the car. We have capacity, we’d take out pretty much all the weight. But there’s some mechanisms that we have to do along that journey. It’s painful but it’s balancing adding aerodynamic performance as well as weight reduction."

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Sam Cook - Digital Journalist

Sam Cook is a talented young sports journalist and social media professional who now specialises in Formula 1, having previously worked as a football journalist and a local news reporter for a variety of different brands.

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F1 Williams James Vowles