Williams has passed all the necessary homologation tests with its 2026 Formula 1 car and will conduct a shakedown of its own ahead of Bahrain testing, having missed this week’s pre-season test at Barcelona.
The team chose to skip the behind-closed-doors test in Spain this week due to delays in getting its new FW48 ready.
It had been speculated that the reason was Williams had repeatedly failed crash tests and was significantly overweight.
Williams team principal James Vowles told select media including The Race on Wednesday that Williams has “passed all necessary tests” and is ready to run in the Bahrain test, which does not start until February 11.
The team will get its car on track before then with a filming day.
Vowles said Williams gradually fell behind schedule as the reality of the 2026 car project became clear, describing it as three times as complicated as anything Williams has ever produced before, which led to parts being late.
He did not directly answer whether Williams had failed crash tests in advance of the Barcelona test, or whether the car is overweight.
“There’s no knowledge of the weight until we get to Bahrain in terms of understanding where it is,” Vowles said.
“There’s not a single person that will truly know it. It’s impossible to know it, because you need the car together without sensors in the right form. And that doesn’t exist today.
“If we end up being over the weight target then from that point along, it’ll be an aggressive programme to get it off.
“But I think right now, anything that you’re seeing as murmurings in the media are murmurings.
“I’ll come out and explain to everyone at the point where we know that. That isn’t today.”
The inference is that the car is overweight but Vowles will not discuss it because there is not yet a known exact mass, so how heavy the car may be cannot be specified.
Most teams are struggling to meet the weight limit for the start of 2026 as the cars are 30kg lighter this year despite having heavier power units.
In terms of crash tests, Vowles did admit there were “compromises” that can be made when part production falls behind schedule and that “we have absolutely pushed the boundaries of what we’re doing in certain areas, and one of those is in certain corresponding tests that go with it”.
Again, the implication is that Williams did fail to pass some tests at the first attempt, but Vowles said “those were only a blip in the grand scheme of things”.
“They are one item out of quite a few that were pushing us absolutely beyond the limit of what we can achieve in the space of time that we have available to us.”
Williams is trying to mitigate the issue of not being in Spain by running an extensive virtual programme with its car, engine and gearbox hooked up together.
It is a much more advanced version of the sort of virtual test track (VTT) programme that would normally be carried out in pre-season and Vowles said being able to do this was part of the justification for not going to Spain.
He said it was possible for the FW48 to have run at Barcelona but the cost to the remainder of the programme would have been too great.
“We could have made it, but in doing so, I would have to turn upside down the impact on spares, components and updates across Bahrain, Melbourne and beyond,” he said.
“And the evaluation of it was that for running in a cold, damp Barcelona, against doing a VTT test, against the spare situation – and frankly, there was zero points for running in a shakedown test – we made the decision.
“And I stand by it, that the right thing to do is to make sure we’re turning up at Bahrain correctly prepared and prepared in Melbourne as well.”
