Rumours began to circulate early this week that Williams had fallen behind schedule in its build programme for the new FW48 – to the extent that it might not be ready to run during the official five-day shakedown at Barcelona.
The team today tried to get ahead of the curve by confirming that this would indeed be the case: not only will it not be present at the first day of running, like McLaren, it will not travel to Barcelona at all.
But while this is embarrassing for a team which has invested so much effort in putting its past behind it – last year Williams made a point of being the first not just to show its car, but run it on track – the delay may not define its season.
Famously, Williams arrived late for the opening test of 2019 and missed the first two days of running, only for the FIA to declare several elements of the FW42’s aerodynamic furniture illegal. Redesigning these areas cost what was already a cash-strapped team in the dog days of family ownership precious resource; the car, lamentably slow anyway, started the season even further behind the development curve.
More recently in 2024, early in the reign of current team principal James Vowles, the FW46 arrived late and overweight, as a consequence of major overhauls to the design and build process. Modernising the system – Vowles revealed that he was alarmed to discover, not long after his arrival, that it was managed via a giant Excel spreadsheet – caused delays which compounded through the winter. To short-cut the stress-analysis element of the design phase, the team resorted to bonding metal into various composite components.
This meant the car was ready for the start of the season but, again, this hogged development bandwidth further down the line as existing areas of the car had to go back through stress analysis cycles to analyse where weight could be pared off.
In 2019 Williams was also late to pre-season testing
Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images
The specific reasons for Williams pulling the plug on its attendance at Barcelona are unknown. Some media outlets have been reporting that the FW48 failed its crash test, but this is understood to be speculation dressed up as fact. It would be highly unusual to be subjecting monocoques to crash testing this late in the day, since this is the first section of the car to be defined.
Indeed, it is known that Ferrari, Audi and Mercedes, to name but three, successfully put their 2026 cars through the crash-testing process at the beginning of December. The monocoque is a long lead-time item so testing its crash-worthiness is not left until the last minute.
So what will Williams lose through missing three days of on-track running in Barcelona? Next week’s session is being officially referred to by F1 and the FIA as a shakedown rather than a test, and is being held behind closed doors. Teams can only run on three of the five days, hence McLaren has elected to start on the second day at the earliest, and others may yet follow suit.
It’s understood that the Barcelona session was envisioned by the stakeholders as an opportunity to prove out the various new technologies on track for the first time, thereby giving teams and the FIA an opportunity to debug any issues which might arise. The active aerodynamics components, for instance, require more on-track running than might be undertaken in an ordinary shakedown to evaluate the resilience of their mechanical systems in operating conditions.
So the majority of teams viewed Barcelona as an opportunity to rack up mileage, before shifting focus to performance at the two Barcelona tests. The way they go about this will naturally differ: some might take to the track in Bahrain with development parts previously unseen, others may wait until the season opener in Melbourne.
Others might delay upgrades until the first series of flyaways have passed – partly because freighting parts now falls within the remit of the cost cap, mostly because they want to learn more about how their new cars perform before they expend effort and resource on development components. McLaren has confirmed this is the policy it intends to follow – as chief designer Rob Marshall said, “I think we’re better off understanding our platform before we get too keen on redesigning it before it’s turned a wheel…”
The cold conditions in Barcelona in January won’t provide grounds for performance running
Photo by: Erik Junius
For these reasons, missing the first three on-track days may not be as big a setback for Williams as it would in previous years. Anyone who has attended an F1 test in Barcelona in January will be well acquainted with the challenges of accomplishing any performance running in those conditions: the track is usually too cold and damp for the cars to risk going out until 10 o’clock or so. If you were expecting the cars to be running from dawn to dusk every day, you would be very wrong.
The real cost to Williams is that whatever shakedown work it needs to do will eat into time in Bahrain in which it would have wanted to accomplish performance testing. And this cannot be substituted in simulation.
But unless the car manifests fundamental problems which have to be fixed quickly, the disadvantage of losing time in Barcelona is mitigated by the many unknowns presented by the new regulations. Especially if rivals are waiting to see how the early races pan out before firming up their plans for where to focus development resource.
And arriving late isn’t always a guarantee of failure. In 1988 McLaren laboured through winter testing with a laggardly mule car, a tardy and uncooperative fusion of 1987 chassis and new Honda turbo engine, before the MP4/4 arrived at the final pre-season test in Imola. That didn’t end too badly, did it?
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