How Williams’ 2024 campaign was dictated by its early heavy car and late crashes

Williams endured a problematic 2024 Formula 1 campaign, beginning the year with an overweight car, and then being forced to revert back to older, heavier parts late on due to a significant number of heavy crashes for both Alex Albon and mid-season substitute Franco Colapinto.

Speaking ahead of the Imola weekend in May, team principal James Vowles conceded that the FW46 was giving away roughly four and a half tenths per lap purely through being over the 798kg minimum weight.

Speaking to Motorsport.com, Williams chief engineer Dave Robson said: “I think if we’d started the year with the car as it was, but on the weight limit, we would have seen a much better string of results at the beginning of the year. And then all the effort that we put into taking the way out, we could have put into doing other things.

“So I think that kind of held back the results, but I think the progress with the car and the understanding of how to evolve the car is still there and it is better than last year’s car.”

Heading into 2024, Williams had already undergone a radical weight loss programme to remove 14kg from the 2023 car.

Explaining the process of shedding further pounds, Robson explained: “There are some parts we simply chose to remake and dedicate more design time to; so more loops through the stress analysis to find a way we can take [weight] off.

“So that’s just a choice of how you spend the resource and where we could, where we hadn’t already made season quantities of parts we could get in there. And from a production point of view, it doesn’t really cost anything, you just have to invest the design time.”

The damaged car of Logan Sargeant, Williams FW46, arrives on the back of a truck in the pit lane

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Williams arrived at Zandvoort with its “first proper upgrade” of the season, as per Alex Albon. This included an updated floor with completely new geometry, a reprofiled diffuser, revised sidepod geometry and a tweaked engine cover design – all updates that aided the weight loss plan.

This was followed in Singapore by a lighter front suspension set-up for Albon, leading Robson to conclude that, aside from outsourced parts, “pretty much everything else we could have a look at, we did”.

But with the weight now in a better place, crashes and the subsequent cost cap implication began to bite. Following a heavy crash at Zandvoort, Logan Sargeant was replaced by Colapinto, but after a positive start to his F1 career, the Argentinian then found the barriers several times, including twice during the Brazilian weekend and once in Las Vegas.

This meant that Williams was forced to revert to an older-spec suspension for Colapinto in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, something which saw weight added back onto the FW46.

But he was not alone in crashing, as Albon added to Williams’ ballooning repair bill with incidents in Mexico and Brazil – Vowles commenting in Las Vegas that crashes to that point had amounted to several million: “Less than 10 but more than three.”

Asked the effect this had on the development plan and budget, Robson, who was speaking ahead of the Las Vegas weekend, said: “Pretty significant, right from the beginning of the year really – apart from a relatively quiet period in the middle where we didn’t damage too much.

“It has been a constant battle and, obviously, the last few weeks have been probably as big a problem as any point in the season because we go into that final two lots of triple-headers really aiming to have everything you need for those six races available at the first of those six races, and then the race team ideally being fairly self-sufficient for seven or eight weeks on the road and the factory then gets on with the race designing and making parts for next year’s car. In reality, that’s not been the case.

Alex Albon, Williams FW42, gets out of the car after crashing

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

“We’ve had to pull factory resource off the FW47 parts and put it back onto making spares for this final triple-header plus the test. So even now, late in the season, that’s delayed or cancelled some smaller upgrade items we’d like to go onto the 46, partly to make the 46 a bit quicker, partly as R&D for 47.

“It’s also delayed some of the 47 productions so we’ve now got to catch that back up so that it doesn’t become an ongoing problem into the beginning of next year. But yeah, throughout the year we’ve spent more time, effort and particularly cost cap money making multiple parts of the same design that we would have been far better off making to a new design, making the car faster.

“So the combination of all of that accident damage and how that saps the resource on top of the starting overweight and having to spend a lot of effort recovering that just means you miss out on the aerodynamic upgrade.”

Williams ended the year in ninth, two places lower than it had achieved in 2023, meaning it received less prize money but will enjoy more windtunnel and CFD time prior to the midseason reset, a factor that could prove crucial ahead of the introduction of all-new technical regulations for 2026.

The team had appeared set to finish at least one place higher on the constructors’ table before a late-season charge from Alpine – aided by a double podium score in Brazil – relegated Williams down the order.

Reflecting how the combined issues of early weight training and consistent crashes had scuppered any true mid-table ambitions, Robson concluded: “In reality, we’ve got one proper aerodynamic upgrade, the front suspension kind of finished that off and ideally that should have come along in the Netherlands as well as part of the entire package, but it was slightly separated – and as we’ve seen, that’s just not enough development to keep up with even the midfield now.

“We could have started the year on weight potentially as the fifth-quickest team, which would have been a good step and I think genuinely showed that sort of improvement was made, and all being well we would have had a good chance of staying there and trying to nibble at the heels of the fourth-quickest team. The season just hasn’t worked out that way and sapping resources on things you’d rather not be doing is a big part of that.”