James Vowles isn’t pretending Williams’ winter has been pristine. The team turned up to 2026’s Barcelona shakedown and watched from the sidelines after delays in getting the new car built — an early reminder that momentum is as much about operations as it is about aerodynamics.
But when the conversation shifts to where Williams can realistically win or lose time this year, Vowles keeps circling back to the same lever: integration. And in a season defined by a regulation reset and a fresh power unit era, he’s adamant Williams’ long-standing Mercedes relationship puts it in a better place than the other teams bolting a Mercedes unit into the back of their cars.
Mercedes remains the grid’s biggest supplier for 2026, powering its own works team plus three customers. With Aston Martin switching to Honda, that customer group is now McLaren, Williams and Alpine — the latter stepping away from building its own engines after a difficult end to that programme.
The early paddock chatter has inevitably grown louder after a heavily publicised, high-mileage Barcelona running for Mercedes-powered cars: a combined 1,136 laps logged by Mercedes engines across the shakedown. For anyone looking for a signpost in the fog of pre-season noise, it’s the sort of number that gets noticed.
Vowles, though, is careful about what he thinks it actually means — and why he believes Williams stands to extract more from Mercedes than its customer rivals.
“Mercedes are mighty at this,” he said, pointing to the way the manufacturer has historically handled big regulation transitions. “They are very good at these regulation changes and bring it all together.”
That “together” is doing a lot of work in Vowles’ argument. The suggestion isn’t that McLaren or Alpine won’t have a strong power unit. It’s that the plumbing around it — the integration between chassis, power unit, cooling, packaging, control systems and, crucially, gearbox — can decide whether a team begins the season with a platform that’s fundamentally coherent or one that’s still being taught how to breathe.
“I think for Alpine, [there] is probably a steeper learning curve than there is for us,” Vowles added. “We’ve been embedded with Mercedes for a long, long time, and we also run their gearbox, which is a difference with McLaren.”
That last line lands like a quiet jab at the complexity of modern car architecture. Customer deals aren’t all identical. In a year where teams are relearning energy deployment, cooling demands and packaging constraints, familiarity with the supplier’s hardware — and the decision to share more of it — can reduce the number of unknowns that steal time early on. Not glamorous, but potentially decisive.
Vowles is also leaning into what Williams can control after losing precious real-world running in Barcelona. While rivals were piling on mileage and filling hard drives with data, Williams was forced to do its heavy lifting elsewhere. Vowles insists the team’s Virtual Track Testing (VTT) programme allowed it to complete the workload it had planned — not as a substitute for reality, but as damage limitation that still lets the engineers stress the right systems.
“I can’t comment on why Alpine and McLaren struggled,” he said. “What I can say is on the VTT, we did the mileage that we wanted to do.”
The emphasis, again, was on integration and robustness rather than lap time theatre. Williams used that virtual programme to push the areas that will come back to bite you in the first hot races if you get them wrong.
“We were stressing the system so what we were looking at is stressing our cooling system, making sure we optimised it, understanding how we can change it for the future as well,” Vowles explained. “So it’s an optimisation for the future.”
It’s a very Vowles way of framing a problem: acknowledge the miss, then drag the discussion back to process. Still, Bahrain is where the narrative becomes much harder to steer. Mileage, consistency and the absence of niggling integration faults are the currency teams will trade in there, and Williams will need a clean, high-volume test to stop Barcelona becoming a running joke.
Vowles, for his part, is betting that the thing Williams has quietly built over more than a decade as a Mercedes customer — shared understanding, shared hardware in key areas, and a team that knows how Mercedes wants to operate — will matter more in 2026 than it did in any of the seasons that came before it.
Because in a regulation reset, the fastest concept isn’t always the one that wins the first month. Sometimes it’s the one that simply works, straight away, while everyone else is still unpicking why their “new era” car keeps finding new ways to say no.
