Will the "big swing" Williams F1 car upgrade be a hit or a miss?
by Stuart Codling · AutosportA new, lighter chassis promises a lot of "innovation" – but Carlos Sainz says this is where the car should have started the year
Williams is bringing a major update package to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, one that team boss James Vowles promised earlier in the season would result in an "almost completely new" car.
What remains to be seen, at this late stage, is how useful it will be – both in terms of immediate performance uplift and the direction of 2027 development.
Alex Albon has described it as a "big step" but team-mate Carlos Sainz – who finished on the podium for Williams in Baku last year – pointed out it was "more in line with what we should have started the year with" and is unlikely to be transformative.
While the mandatory FIA "car presentation" document describing the upgrade lists a host of aerodynamic changes, the most significant development is not on the list because cannot be seen from the exterior: a new chassis with substantial lightweighting measures.
The FW48 was finished late and missed the pre-season shakedown after failing crash tests which required key areas to be strengthened. Its performance thus far has been characterised by a lack of efficient downforce, handling quirks which have dogged Williams for several seasons, but most of all excess weight. The car was understood to have started the season at least 20kg over the minimum weight limit.
This dictated a shift in the upgrade plan, since as a rule of thumb every kilo over the weight limit costs around 30 milliseconds of lap time, depending on track configuration. The package applied in Miami, centred around a new floor and front wing, plus the adoption of a Ferrari-style exhaust winglet, was described as bringing the FW48 to where it should have been at the start of the season, albeit still overweight by an unspecified amount.
Further updates have been relatively minor and infrequent, largely based around weight saving, and applied when load-bearing components have reached the end of their service life. This, Vowles explained earlier in the season, was to minimise expenditure so the team could prioritise other spending within F1's budget cap.
But what this has also done is set up expectations of what the long-promised B-spec FW48 would look like when it finally arrived in Baku. Realistically, having fallen out of sync with rivals, Williams is not going to claw back all the deficit it has accumulated – especially since other teams have continued to introduce their own updates after this one was signed off for production.
"Obviously we've been carrying a substantial weight penalty this year so far, and I think going into this weekend we've got ballast on the car," said Albon when asked by Autosport what his genuine expectations may be.
"So, you could imagine there's a big swing in many ways. It's, again, a testament to how much work we've actually been doing behind the scenes. And I think a lot of new technology and a lot of innovation was done to achieve that.
"The weight itself is obviously a big thing, and weight is a guarantee in terms of lap time. So that's why we kind of know it will be a good step, regardless of how the aero side performs. But yeah, it's a good upgrade.
"I think what you have to also appreciate is just how well the midfield, especially this year, are upgrading as well. And so even though we have a big upgrade, it's not a magnitude that can outpace the midfield at the minute.
"So, it's a good one and I think in any other year it would have been a massive one, but because of this year, the way it's going, it's not going to get us back into contention with that group."
While saving weight naturally brings a lap time gain, this tapers off once the car hits the minimum weight. If the chassis can be brought below this, there is room to tune its handling through strategic placement of the ballast required to bring it back to the limit.
Beyond that, additional performance is largely a factor of aerodynamics, power unit management, suspension geometry and set-up. Williams tweaked its rear suspension geometry earlier in the season.
The Baku update, beyond the lighter chassis, features a new floor and tail assembly with different aerodynamic geometries at the front and rear. There are detail changes to the flow conditioners on the front and rear brake assemblies, as well as the rear suspension.
Aerodynamic development in Formula 1 is an iterative and incremental process. There is no single part which can be changed or swapped out to find a lap time gain in the magnitude of half a second or so. Each component has to work as part of a flow system with those downstream, and the effectiveness of changes can only be definitively evaluated on track.
So Williams has in effect stagnated while rivals have found incremental gains. It is not going to recoup the entire deficit with one package which is not yet optimised through track running – in the same way Aston Martin substantially revised its tardy AMR26 for Hungary and the result was merely less bad than before.
"I think probably in Madrid we hit the bottom, as low as you can get around the race track for Williams because we were more than three seconds off the pace, more than a second and a half of the midfield guys," said Sainz.
"Obviously all the lack of development of the year had accumulated until that point and now we bring something that is more in line with what we should have started the year with. But it's still what we should have started, not race 14 or race 15 of the season.
"So we're still carrying the deficit and the issues of the winter and it will take all the way until next year, even halfway through next year to get to a performance level where I think it's reasonable and where the team can show the capacity.
"In a track like Madrid we were one and a half seconds off the midfield leader, and I know we're not bringing one and a half seconds to Baku. So it will not be a disappointment because I'm realistic, and I know which numbers we're playing with."
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