Williams didn’t just skip a week of running in Barcelona — it voluntarily gave up the one thing every team craves at the start of a new rules cycle: hard reality.
But James Vowles is adamant the Grove squad won’t arrive in Melbourne already fighting yesterday’s battle. Yes, Williams was the only team absent from the pre-season shakedown in Spain after delays in the build process forced it to pull the plug. And yes, that leaves it, in the plainest sense, behind on mileage while rivals banked early laps and began the messy business of correlating wind tunnel and CFD promises with what the car actually does on tarmac.
Vowles doesn’t deny any of that. He just doesn’t accept it’s fatal — not with two further tests still to come before the season-opener, and not with the way Williams has tried to spend the lost week.
“I would much prefer to be in Barcelona,” he said, making it clear the plan had been to run and that missing the shakedown wasn’t some cute “different programme” spin. “That was the goal. That was what we intended. We did not achieve it.”
Instead, Williams pivoted to what it could control: a week of Virtual Track Test work and heavy simulator running with both Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon. It’s a familiar modern safety net, but it’s also one with limits that every engineer in the paddock understands instinctively. You can validate systems, run procedures, stress-test software and iron out operational gremlins — but you can’t truly discover how your aero map behaves when the wind direction shifts, the track grip ramps unexpectedly, and the platform starts doing things the model didn’t warn you about.
That’s the bit Vowles concedes Williams has sacrificed.
“What’s missing is a correlation for where aerodynamics really are,” he said. “Track data is the only way of establishing that.”
Still, Vowles believes Williams has two meaningful mitigations. The first is simple: six more days of testing remain, and those days will be far more valuable if the team arrives with the car functioning properly and its internal processes already rehearsed through VTT and simulator work, rather than half-ready and trying to debug basic issues at the circuit.
The second is the upside of being a Mercedes customer in a year when reliability and integration are going to make or break early mileage. Vowles pointed out that Mercedes has “sufficient runners” — a pointed reminder that while Williams sat out Barcelona, Mercedes-powered cars have been generating feedback on the gearbox and power unit. That information, he suggested, can be fed back into Williams’ preparation ahead of running in Bahrain.
“In addition, we are fortunate to the fact that Mercedes has sufficient runners that there’s quite a bit of information coming back on both the gearbox and the power unit that enables us to get ahead when we come to Bahrain,” Vowles said. “Which means, I do not believe with six days testing, we’ll be on back foot.
“A little bit of that’s fortune, because the engine, the power unit, is reliable, the gearbox is reliable, and the VTT testing flushed out a lot of the demons that are buried in the car.”
It’s a revealing choice of words. When a team principal talks about “demons”, what he’s really describing is the kind of pre-season chaos that can swallow whole test days: sensor faults, hydraulic quirks, electronic gremlins, basic cooling questions, and the endless knock-on effects of packaging decisions you only truly interrogate when the car is running for real. Vowles is effectively arguing Williams has done a chunk of that firefighting without the cameras and without the pressure of wasting precious on-track time.
What it can’t buy back is the drivers’ natural feel for the new car. Not the headline lap time — the deeper, harder-to-teach understanding of where it bites, what it likes on entry, how it responds when you lean on it with fuel and tyres in different windows. With Sainz still bedding in at a new team and Albon needing early confidence in a car that’s inevitably different to what he ended 2025 with, there’s a human cost to missing an entire week of real running.
“What’s missing is there’s a lot of knowledge for the drivers to inherently perfect what’s going on on track,” Vowles admitted.
Williams’ answer is to drown that deficit in simulator hours, including with its driver-in-loop set-up that Vowles described as “state of the art”. It’s a credible plan — up to a point. If the correlation is good, it can accelerate the learning curve. If it isn’t, it can leave you chasing a set-up direction that only exists in the model.
And that’s where the story gets more interesting than a simple “missed test, team worried” narrative. Williams isn’t just trying to catch up in kilometres; it’s trying to ensure the first kilometres it does get are worth something. In a new-era car, the temptation is always to bolt on sensors, run through the easy programme, and tell yourself you’ll find the performance later. The risk, of course, is that “later” arrives while your rivals are already refining.
There’s also an unresolved question Vowles wasn’t prepared to dress up: weight.
Concerns persist that Williams’ 2026 car could be overweight relative to its rivals. Vowles’ line was bluntly consistent with what he said when the team explained the Barcelona absence: until the race cars are built in the correct specification, he won’t put a number on it — or even confirm where Williams sits.
“In terms of weight, until there’s two race cars built in the correct specification going forward, it’s hard to comment on that one,” he said. “Does that stop you being competitive right now? No one knows, and I really do mean no one knows what the pecking order is… So it’s hard for me to answer that question.”
That’s the kind of answer that can be read two ways. On the surface, it’s reasonable caution before anyone has lined up properly. Underneath, it’s also the language of a team that knows it won’t have the full picture until it’s seen the car in its final form — which, for Williams, is precisely the point. Barcelona was meant to be the first proper reality check. Now Bahrain has to do the job at double speed.
Vowles is selling calm, and there’s logic to his case: there’s still time, Mercedes-derived information helps, and a week of virtual work can prevent operational self-harm. But the paddock truth remains the same. Everyone else has already started turning their 2026 concept into something tangible. Williams hasn’t — yet.
The only way to settle whether this was a manageable stumble or the first sign of a compromised start is the one Vowles keeps coming back to: track data. And Williams is about to learn, very quickly, what it’s been missing.
