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James Vowles explains why Williams cannot immediately fix FW48 weight issue
James Vowles says Williams has completed the engineering work to reduce the FW48’s weight, but cost cap limits mean the fixes cannot be introduced all at once
Alex Harrington
Edited: May 15, 2026, 12:52 PM
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Alexander Albon, Williams
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
The engineering work is done and the parts exist, at least on paper. Williams team principal James Vowles has confirmed that the solutions for addressing his car's weight problem are in hand, but Formula 1's cost cap makes deploying these upgrades all at once financially impossible.
Speaking on The Vowles Verdict on YouTube, the Grove chief offered a detailed explanation of why fans of the team should expect a gradual fix instead of a plethora of upgrades in one race.
"In the press conference I spoke about the engineering work required to reduce all the weight is complete, which is the case as it is now. So really great work by our design team and the engineering work that we needed to do to effectively bring this car to not just the weight limit but actually significantly below the weight limit is done," Vowles said.
The problem is converting these concepts into physical components under the constraints of the championship's cost cap.
The FW48 is understood to have started the season much heavier than the team would have wanted due to the car failing crash tests ahead of testing. While this excess fat was partly trimmed for the Miami Grand Prix, there's still a long way to go before real change can be seen.
"Now the importance of that is the next stage, we have to be able to produce those parts," the former Mercedes strategist continued. "And what I indicated is one of the limitations of the cost cap. And again, the cost cap is a very good thing but the limitation is I simply can't produce all of those bits overnight.
"We could, but it would have cost us a tremendous amount. And what I indicated is that is one of the limitations."
The issue isn't the manufacturing capability of the team, it's instead wastage.
Vowles continued to explain that several components for the car - suspension legs, axles, uprights, wheels - were created in bulk before the season start to ensure that there's enough to "carry ourselves through".
"There are items that have quite high mileage limits. Now they don't last to the end of the year and what we want to make sure we do is produce new sets of those that have weight taken out of them. Same applies - by the way - to wheels for example.
"Now we could do that immediately and accept that that old stock is basically thrown out, but that's not efficient in the cost cap.
"Effectively you're still now going to not get to the end of the year and have to produce more parts as a result of it so there's a balancing act that you need to be doing."
Carlos Sainz, Williams
Photo by: Chris Graythen / Getty Images
The same is the case for aerodynamic parts such as the front wing.
"The front wing I know we can find more weight out of it," he added. "But I also know that in the wind tunnel we've got quite a good step of performance in that front wing. So there's no point just reproducing exactly the same part that's a few kilos lighter rather than a brand new front wing that allows us to add at the same time performance aerodynamically.
"So you want to try and balance when you have performance coming at the same time as your weight reduction programmes and there's a fine art to it but I think we've got a good programme of work that takes us through this year."
This means that for most of the summer, Williams will be racing a car that its own engineers have fixed, but, for these reasons, has yet to implement those fixes. That's going to be frustrating for its drivers, Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz.
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