Vowles explains Albon’s exploding engine cover and Williams’ Canadian GP collapse

Williams' promising Canadian Grand Prix weekend unravelled due to multiple issues, with the team scoring only a single point on the Sunday

The 2025 Canadian Grand Prix was supposed to be a strong race for the Williams team, which has had a successful showing so far this season. But Murphy's Law was in full effect as their weekend came crashing down around them. Speaking ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, team principal James Vowles explained how their Montreal campaign unravelled, as well as what caused driver Alex Albon's engine cover to "explode".

"A weekend full of promise, and on Friday the car was competitive and quick," he said during his fan-favourite Vowles Verdict update video. "However, that didn't translate going into Saturday."

The FW47 looked genuinely competitive on the fast track with Albon and Sainz finishing in the top three on Friday's FP1 and the former finishing fourth on the timesheets in FP2. But with the usual caveats attached, Friday's form can be fool's gold.

"On Saturday the wind rotated, became stronger, and the track temperature came up by 7 degrees - very small margins, but it looked to impact our car more than others, and we fell away from our competition," Vowles continued.

"Perhaps as significantly, we caused a red flag in Q1 as a result of the engine cover on Alex's car effectively exploding as a result of a tiny crack that initiated. That hindered Carlos - he was on his lap where the red flag meant he couldn't finish it, and on his next run he was blocked by Hadjar, which cost about three-tenths and meant he was out in Q1. But he had so much promise and pace."

Alex Albon, Williams

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

The engine cover failure sent carbon fibre debris across the track necessitating a red flag, and with a mistake from Racing Bulls team, the Grove squad's Saturday must have been a tiresome one.

"With Alex, we put an immense amount of pressure on him and on the pit crew. We did a sterling job of turning that car around in just a few minutes. And on Alex - well done to him. He had just one lap, and he made it count, putting that car ultimately through into Q3.

"Saturday aside and now looking at Sunday, I think the car was competitive, but Alex fell back at the start and wasn’t able to recover as much. We went for a slightly different strategy with both pushing towards that one-stop, which, as you can see, you had to get just right to make that one-stop work.

"In the case of Carlos starting on the hard, he was able to do it. In the case of Alex, it’s very marginal, but he would have made it work until we then had the issue with the cooling system that meant that he DNFd."

A cooling issue brought Albon's race to an early end, but a P10 finish from his Spanish team-mate at least brought some solace to the team.

"Well done to Carlos. He fought absolutely brilliantly and came back and brought a point for the team. But more so than that, we need to look at the weekend as a whole and realise we didn’t get anything close to the most out of it.

"That’s a combination of reliability, operations, strategy, and just making sure the weekend comes together as a whole - and we have some learning to do."