Why Williams doesn't see F1 2026 as an acid test

Off the back of a much-improved 2025 campaign which yielded a comfortable fifth place in the Formula 1 world constructors' standings, Williams is now a team that is looking up rather than over down.

Over the past 18 months the Grove-based squad harvested bountiful low-hanging fruit that was holding it back, and that meant that while its aerodynamic development has largely been focused on 2026 and beyond, it still found ways to improve its performance level with the FW47, guided by its experienced driver line-up of Alex Albon and Ferrari hire Carlos Sainz.

But while Williams' trajectory has been likened to that of world champion McLaren three or four years ago, when the Woking-based squad was embarking on a similar rebuild, Vowles is also the first to admit Williams remains a work in progress and is not ready for life at the very top of F1 yet.

That's why he sees 2026's wholesale regulations changes as a big opportunity for Williams to take the next steps in its large-scale overhaul rather than the final exam of whether his team has succeeded.

"I think it's harder within the current regulations set to be finding performance relative to others, when you're constrained by perhaps a way of thinking or a construct you've had before, whereas 2026 really is just a clean sheet of paper, so you're able to approach it a very different way," Vowles explained to Motorsport.com in an exclusive interview.

"But I don't think it's an acid test. I think it's just a continuation of the journey. I think, if anything, the opportunity to scrap a few things and start again gives us a bit of a leg up."

Williams took two podiums with Carlos Sainz in Baku and Qatar as part of a much-improved 2025 campaign

That journey has involved plenty of ups and downs, including the humiliation of not being able to field two cars in 2024's Japanese Grand Prix due to a lack of spare chassis. At the time Williams was fighting to produce two cars that were on weight and on the same specification, an uncomfortable situation that it fully addressed for 2025.

It is just one public example of how its many behind-the-scenes changes have addressed some of the structural issues Vowles identified after joining from top team Mercedes, and the other is a - very limited - upgrade programme that showed the Grove factory was operating much more efficiently than before. But Vowles suggested the general lack of 2025 aero development was also an opportunity to focus on other areas, giving the team the freedom to use the 2025 season to experiment.

"We've only put a couple of weeks of aerodynamic development into the 2025 car during the year," he said. "But what we've been working on instead is: 'Do we have the right balance? Do we have the right way of working the tyres? Do we have the right way of communicating with the drivers? Do we have the right differential tools? All those are zero cost. They're just about using a product in a different way to what we had before.

"Quite a bit of performance that was locked away has been coming out of that, and that's what I've been focused on.

"It's what I like about our sport. You constrain yourself in one way by not putting any more development in this car, but I give you the freedom every weekend to go out there and try something different. As long as it is backed up by logic and has a data-driven mechanism behind it, then I'm fine to support it and try it. And that's what we've been doing, and it's working. You could see across the year how, despite the car not changing, we were moving forward."

More "honest" Williams ready for more change

That kind of approach is only possible within a transparent organisation. One of the biggest changes Vowles has had to make since taking over at Grove is stamping out the team's previous blame culture and providing the "psychological safety" for departments to be brutally honest rather than fool itself.

"It's very easy for you to produce a report that says I've added two tenths of performance this week through X, Y and Z - not validated, not backed up, not checked," he explained.

Alex Albon, Williams

"And actually, what we do now is very robust, peer reviewed checks on what performance we're adding, how it's adding, and it's what I call honest, correct accounting. In aerodynamics, all too often you have something called drift, and there's two ways to deal with drift. You can just go: 'That's our new benchmark'. Or you go: 'No, I've lost a point, and I'm going to get that point back.'

"And we're very good here at doing what I think is honest accounting because of the psychological safety and belief in the culture to do so.

"I'm giving you a lot of detail, but actually the biggest change is we have a culture that is ready for more. We know we're not at a championship level yet, but that scrutiny we apply to ourselves allows us to be stronger."

Any change is difficult at first, but the results Vowles' approach has been yielding means the Williams' organisation has become much more amenable to it.

"As an organisation the first change you make is hard, but then you become more agile and more accommodating to it as you see that the change is net beneficial," he explained. "So I'd actually say globally, we've changed more in 2025 than we did in 2023 and 2024, but the business is also ready for it.

"And now we have a really interesting situation where the business is going: 'Okay, what next? What else do we do? Let's go.' It's great. And now we have to move faster than we did before."

F1 2026 rules 'in a good place'

Quite how that will pan out for Williams in 2026 is anyone's guess right now, and it will likely take several races into the new campaign to have a clear picture of F1's new world order.

James Vowles, Team Principal, Williams Racing

"This is just guesswork," Vowles said. "But clearly, we won't see the same gaps we had in 2025 where a few tenths separates a few cars. But conversely, it won't be anywhere near 2014 where there's like three and a half seconds, it'll be somewhere between the two.

"That said, there'll be a couple of teams who have now done a power unit for the first time, have done a car for the first time. It really is hard and competitive now. Let's be completely blunt, that's why we fell back to 10th for a period of time.

"I think the gaps will be a couple of seconds front to back, but I still think you'll have competition at the sharp end, which is a good point. And the sport has understood that we need competition, so therefore we will close the regulations up in a way that will create that."

He added: "I think the regulations are in a good place now. I'm sure we're going to see overtaking, it just won't be in the places you normally expect it to be, because it is an electrical energy chess game that you'll be playing.

"But I think it's worth saying the regulations from where they were when we were talking in Montreal in 2024 [when they were first revealed by the FIA] to where they are today are quite different, and it's produced a much better package."

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