What’s worse than having a streak of major Formula 1 crashes that mean one of your drivers has to sit out a grand prix, and you struggle thereafter to field two cars with the newest specification of parts?
That scenario happening twice…as Williams is finding out right now after a second brutal crash streak threatens to spoil the end of its already testing season.
Williams’s compromised winter led to James Vowles implementing a revolution of how Williams designs and produces an F1 car, moving away from a car build process that relied on listing 20,000 individual components in Microsoft Excel.
But those changes were only going to pay off in the longer term. At the start of this season, Williams was vulnerable with only two chassis for the opening races.
So when it suffered three major crashes on the other side of the world to Williams’s Grove base, the team faced a repair bill in excess of $2 million, and had some tough choices to make.
Logan Sargeant was forced to sit out the Australian Grand Prix so team leader Alex Albon could take his car, and thereafter Sargeant claimed he had a spec difference for three months before Williams gave him the upgraded lighter floor for the Austrian Grand Prix.
There were further incidents - including Sargeant destroying a set of the Zandvoort upgrades before he was dropped days later - but Williams has mostly had a lid on the situation until the “most brutal weekend” of Vowles’s career plunged Williams back into a parts crisis.
Albon and team-mate Franco Colapinto both crashed in qualifying in Brazil, with the former having to miss the grand prix because the team couldn’t repair his car in time.
The team did manage to repair Colapinto’s car in time but he crashed under the safety car while trying to cope with the worsening rain. That came one week after a bruising Mexican GP in which Albon clashed with Yuki Tsunoda in the race, having already collided with Ollie Bearman’s Ferrari in a bizarre practice shunt.
‘No team can sustain this’
Williams isn’t the only team coping with a lengthy repair bill in F1’s cost cap era. Both Mercedes drivers and Sergio Perez are feeling the effects of car development being limited by a spate of incidents.
But with the biggest damage bill of the season and its relatively small - if ever-expanding - size, it's feeling the effects worse than any team in the paddock.
Right now Williams doesn’t know if these crashes will repeat the kind of intra-team spec difference that’s been present through much of the season.
“There’s no team on the grid that can cope with five major accidents in two race weekends,” Vowles said in a video released on Thursday after Brazil.
“Simply, the amount of spares we carry are not sufficient to carry that amount of attrition. [Las] Vegas I have high hopes for, we were fast there last year, and I’m confident we have a car that can work well in those conditions.
“We’re going to do our absolute utmost to get two cars to the best specification that they can be, with sufficient spares around to make that happen.
“What that looks like is difficult to predict at the moment, we’re still getting the items back from Brazil and determining what we have to do in terms of construct, build, in order to get ourselves in the best place possible.”
One possible scenario is that Williams will focus on building up Albon’s car to the latest specification and then see what parts are left to get Colapinto up to the as close a spec as possible.
But the team’s still working out what’s feasible and the three-week gap to Las Vegas has come at a handy time, even if shipping the cars back out again to North America means it's not a full three weeks, and the cars and parts also had to travel back from Brazil.
If Las Vegas would have been the weekend after Brazil, it seems near impossible that Williams would have fielded two cars at the latest spec.
Handing Colapinto’s car to Albon on Sunday morning for the grand prix was never an option after Albon crashed in Q3.
The team would have needed to swap in all of Albon’s engine components and with only a few hours between the end of qualifying and the grand prix, this wasn’t impossible even if Williams had wanted to.
Just a blip?
Vowles insists another brutal week - as painful as it has been - is just a ‘blip’ in his ongoing restructuring of the team.
“This team is going through the process of rebuilding itself into a state where it can win races in the future,” Vowles said.
“That doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t change without significant change to that organisation. This one race is simply just a blip in what is the grand scheme of a multi-year programme.
“That doesn’t mean it hurts any less, it hurts tremendously. I want us to be successful and performant, but I came here not to be fighting for the odd point, but rather fighting for wins and more in the future.
“That can’t be achieved without some level of compromise along the way, without rebuilding an organisation along the way. So yes it’s painful what happened last weekend, but it hasn’t changed what our destination is, not whatsoever at all. In fact, it’s rooted me even more into what we have to do to achieve is significant but we can achieve it together as a team.”
When asked what he said to Williams employees to lift their spirits on Sunday night, Vowles said: “It’s part of a journey but it’s not our destination. I said all along, '23, '24, '25, they don’t have a material impact on us as a team.
“'26, '27, '28 do. It’s a long way away but it’s an investment in the future and it’s making sure we’re doing the right things for the continuing success for the team, rather than at one race weekend.
“At no time has our destination changed, I know where we’re going and we know how we’re going to achieve that and get there.
“Frustrating as it is, you want to look back on this and remember it as just a part of what we had to go through to be successful.”
Prize money hit
In full contrast to Williams’s nightmare Brazilian GP weekend, constructors’ championship rival Alpine enjoyed a dream result.
A double podium boosted the team from ninth to sixth, likely to result in a $30 million swing in prize money if Alpine can hold that position after the final three races.
F1 2024’s fight for sixth
6 Alpine 49 points
7 Haas 46 points
8 RB 44 points
9 Williams 17 points
Haas and/or RB have a good chance of overhauling it with a car that’s been faster on average than Alpine’s.
But Williams making up the 27-point deficit even to the next-best RB with what’s on its very best day, a marginally faster car, is going to be a big long shot.
Having two optimal cars for Las Vegas is particularly important given it’s the sort of track that should suit it far more than the tricky run of races during the Americas triple-header.
But whatever car specification it arrives with in Vegas, Williams is essentially praying not to have a Brazil repeat to give it a chance to avoid the ≈$10 million prize money loss Alpine leapfrogging it will cost it.
“It’s worth congratulating Alpine on a fantastic performance,” Vowles said.
“Not a foot wrong all weekend and brilliant drives from both their drivers. They deserved a double podium. It’s shaken up the championship order no doubt about it.
“But also I’d say we have three races remaining, and what Brazil showed you more than anything is that anything can happen across a race weekend.
“We’ll be there until the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi making sure we do everything we can to deliver performance to the car.”
Vowles rightly points to the coming years as where history will remember the success or failure of his revival efforts. But that isn’t going to stop him and the whole team from feeling the aftershock of another brutal week in the most punishing of years.