Alex Albon isn’t pretending Williams’ 2026 reset has started elegantly. If anything, he’s describing the FW48 as a car that arrived carrying its own penalties — the sort you feel before you’ve even begun the real job of making it quick.
“It will be tough,” Albon said on *The Fast And The Curious* podcast. “But there’s so much baggage on the car… there’s a lot of potential for us to go forward. So, it won’t happen overnight, and it really is a race-by-race, chip away at it kind of thing.”
That word — “baggage” — is doing a lot of work. Williams has spent the opening phase of F1’s new era trying to get on top of fundamental deficits that have made everything else harder: delayed preparation, a car that turned up overweight, and reliability issues that have repeatedly hijacked any chance of clean learning weekends.
The team acknowledged earlier in the year it was late into the test arena because of delays in the FW48 programme, with Williams framing it as the by-product of pushing for maximum performance. When the car did roll out, it was still notably above the weight target — team principal James Vowles admitting he had multiple potential fixes in front of him, but with the cost cap making the route from idea to hardware far less straightforward than fans might assume.
In a regulation reset season, being heavy isn’t just an annoyance; it’s a performance ceiling. It blunts tyre life, limits setup freedom, and forces trade-offs that show up everywhere from traction phases to stint management. It also tends to distort development reads: you can bring downforce, but until you unload kilos, you don’t always see the honest lap time return.
Williams hasn’t exactly been gifted the stable platform required to work through that. Reliability has bitten both sides of the garage. Carlos Sainz was unable to qualify in Australia. Albon didn’t even start in China. And in Japan, Albon effectively spent Sunday running an improvised test programme, hamstrung by energy deployment problems that triggered four pit visits as the team attempted to gather data and keep the car circulating.
So far, the points column reflects the mess. Only Sainz has scored, thanks to ninth in China — a race where just 15 drivers made it to the flag. Useful, certainly, but not representative of where Williams wanted to be after hiring a proven front-running benchmark in Sainz and talking up a cleaner start to the new rules cycle.
The calendar has, oddly, offered Williams a breather. The cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian races after Japan handed the team additional factory time — the rarest commodity when you’re trying to untangle early-season problems while the rest of the grid is already layering upgrades onto cars that basically work.
Albon is adamant progress is coming, but he’s careful not to sell it as a single “fix” moment — a refreshingly realistic position in a year when fans expect miracle packages and instant reversals.
“I think that, for example, we have an upgrade package in Miami,” he said. “It will be better, but it won’t be the best thing since sliced bread. Realistically, we are now repositioning our focus.
“It will be to get back into the midfield fight and then get to the top of that fight.”
That’s the more telling line: repositioning the focus. Not chasing headlines, not declaring a leap to the front, but re-centering on a reachable target after the opening rounds exposed how much basic work still has to be done. Miami, by Albon’s own framing, is a step — not salvation.
Still, his optimism isn’t blind. He’s leaning on something the paddock broadly accepts about 2026: the development curves are steep, and the gaps can move quickly if a team gets its processes and correlation under control. Albon expects the FW48 to look dramatically different by the end of the year, not because of one silver-bullet upgrade, but because the car’s starting point leaves so much lap time on the table.
“And by the time the end of the year comes around, we’re going to have a completely different car than where we are right now,” he added. “So, full push ahead. The factory is absolutely flat out.”
There’s a psychology to this phase, too. When you begin a new rules era on the back foot, the danger isn’t just points lost in the spring — it’s the temptation to thrash, to chase too many problems at once, to burn budget on dead ends. Williams’ challenge is to turn “baggage” into a structured to-do list: weight reduction where it counts, reliability that allows proper development mileage, and upgrades that genuinely stack rather than simply shifting the balance of a compromised baseline.
Miami will be the next reference point. Not a verdict, but a clue as to whether Williams is finally digging itself out with a spade rather than a teaspoon. For now, Albon’s message is simple: the car is carrying too much — in kilograms and in unresolved issues — but there’s enough potential in it to make the slog worthwhile.
