Williams has finally shown its hand for 2026 — and, in a paddock week where everyone’s counting laps and kilometre totals like loose change, that matters almost as much as the shade of blue on the bodywork.
The FW48 hit the Bahrain circuit on Tuesday morning in the team’s race livery, using one of its two permitted filming days to claw back time after a disrupted run-up to the first proper test. Earlier this month Williams completed a shakedown at Silverstone with a one-off design, but this was the first public outing of the scheme it intends to carry through the season: a return to a familiar Williams blue, with white detailing concentrated towards the rear.
There’s a branding story here — teams don’t “go traditional” by accident — but the real subtext is operational. Williams missed the initial behind-closed-doors shakedown at the Circuit de Catalunya after delays in the FW48 programme, a rare hiccup for a team that has been trying to project steadiness under James Vowles’ leadership. The statement at the time was blunt about the cause: it opted out of Barcelona “following delays in the FW48 programme as we continue to push for maximum car performance”.
The Bahrain filming day doesn’t erase that lost running, but it does soften the blow. Under the filming-day allowance, Williams can cover 200km — around 36 laps of Sakhir — which is a meaningful chunk of systems work before the serious business starts on Wednesday. In the new era of tight testing restrictions, any opportunity to validate basic functionality, bedding-in processes and garage rhythm is worth taking, especially for a team that arrives with a new car and a need to hit the ground running.
Vowles has been careful not to oversell what the early signs mean. Even while insisting the FW48 is “the best I’ve seen us produce” during his time at the helm, he also underlined the obvious caveat: it’s not a promise of where Williams will sit when everyone’s running comparable programmes. Bahrain, and then the races beyond it, will tell that story.
That’s why Tuesday’s run carried a little extra edge. A filming day is not a test day in the modern sense — the priorities are different and the mileage is capped — but it’s still a chance to knock the rust off before the stopwatch and the scrutiny really arrive. If you’ve already had to sit out one key pre-season box-ticking exercise, you don’t want to spend the first morning of official testing discovering a minor fault that could’ve been caught 24 hours earlier.
The team also leaned into the moment, posting images from the paddock as Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon arrived for the day’s running — a small reminder that Williams’ driver line-up is one of the more intriguing pairings on the grid, and that 2026 is supposed to be about converting momentum into measurable gains.
Ultimately, the timing is the point. With pre-season testing beginning on Wednesday, Williams is now less than a day away from getting its first proper read on where the FW48 stacks up in the new season. The team can talk about how the car “looks” and how it has been “pushed” in development terms, but the paddock will reserve judgement until the first runs under comparable conditions start to land.
For now, the headline is simple: Williams is on track in Bahrain, in its proper colours, with valuable kilometres in the bank — and after the Barcelona absence, that alone is a small but important win before the real questions arrive.
