Williams Head of Vehicle Performance Dave Robson revealed that crash damage during the 2024 Formula 1 season diverted resources away from next season’s preparations.
Williams was blighted by significant crashes across the final two triple headers of the 2024 F1 season.
In Brazil, a crash for Alex Albon in qualifying wrote his car off for the race and Franco Colapinto destroyed his FW46 in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix after crashing amid severely wet conditions behind the Safety Car.
That prompted a significant repair job back at Grove for Williams to get its two cars ready for the Las Vegas GP, whereby Colapinto suffered a high-speed crash in Qualifying.
With Albon also in a high-speed Lap 1 crash in Mexico City a week before the Sao Paulo GP, Williams’ mechanics have had a torrid end to 2024.
Asked ahead of the Qatar GP how difficult the damage sustained to Williams’ cars had been, Robson told select media including Motorsport Week: “Very difficult.
“Clearly going into two lots of triple headers we’d have ideally gone to the first of those races with everything we needed to cover off the six races and left the race team to be fairly self-sufficient for 7-8 weeks and let the factory focus on making parts for next year.
“Clearly we haven’t been able to do that so we’ve had to mobilise the factory back to get on to making spare parts to cover this final triple-header so there will be some knock-on to next year’s production schedule.
“But we’ll be able to catch that up, so I don’t think it’ll have a lasting effect but it’s definitely tricky, then the cost cap side of it is a challenge – you leave some margin knowing there’ll be some attrition but when it’s a lot you’ve got to cut back elsewhere pretty clearly.”
2025 F1 production schedule impacted by Williams crashes
Robson explained that the design development for 2025 and ’26 hasn’t been adversely affected by Williams’ crash-prone end to 2024.
Instead, it’s merely the production of parts for 2025 and beyond that has been put on the back burner after Williams scrambled to prepare race-ready cars to see out the final races this year.
“In terms of development of 25 and 26 there’s no impact, it’s only in the production,” Robson explained.
“We would have got on with making some bits a bit sooner, be those R&D test parts for the 26 car or race car parts for next year.
“I don’t think it’ll impact the starting spec of next year’s car, it’s just we’d have liked to have get a bit further ahead on production than we would have done.”
This could potentially land Williams in a similar situation to which it started in 2024.
Procedural changes and delays meant Williams worked until the 11th hour to have its cars ready in time for pre-season testing.
This led to a reduction in spares, and Logan Sargeant being withdrawn from the Australian GP in favour of Albon after the Anglo-Thai driver wrote off a chassis in practice.
Moreover, Williams spent the first half of the F1 season overweight due to a hectic winter.
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