Williams ‘fighting for sixth or seventh’ after upgrade

Williams team principal James Vowles is targeting a top seven result for his team at the Italian Grand Prix this weekend.

The high speed Monza circuit has tended to be a strong venue for Williams in recent years. The team scored points in each of the last three races at the track.

Alexander Albon set the eighth fastest time in the first practice session on Friday. Despite attempting to develop their car to perform better at more circuit types than just low-downforce circuits, Vowles still expects the team to be strong this weekend and fight for solid points.

“We’ve migrated the car away from this sort of ‘peaky’ car that works just at Monza,” he told the official F1 channel. “But we’ve also added a huge package at Zandvoort, which you started to see the output of.

“It should pay more dividends here – this is more where we developed the car towards. I think P8’s a sensible position, but it was a topsy-turvy session whereby lots of cars doing their lap late on. I think you’re going to find, I hope, it’s close at the front and we’re sort of a little bit further forward than eighth – hard to tell where, seventh or sixth – but fighting in that position.

“What’s also interesting is you had Valtteri [Bottas] up there doing a lap. That caught me off-guard a little bit, so I just need to understand why he was there and what’s going on. What I can say is we should have a package that’s not just in Monza, but all remaining tracks, a competitive one. And I hope this weekend you start to see that.”

After the team chose to replace Logan Sargeant with Franco Colapinto for the remainder of the season, Vowles explained his reasoning for picking the team’s junior driver.

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“I think there’s a combination of three things,” he said.

“First and foremost, it’s that in his F2 career, he’s making a lot of progress in a team that is okay, but they’re really not a front-running team and he’s out there performing for wins and podiums. That’s a good accolade to his performance.

“Second, we have him in the simulator doing thousands of kilometres. He’s been a part of why the car’s been developed the way it is, he’s in there contributing towards that at the same time and, from Melbourne to here, we’ve seen the progression I need, where actually the lap times are very close to Alex. Now, it’s a simulator, but what we’re looking for is progression over time and how they deal with additional information coming at you and how they process it. And he’s been getting better and better in that regard.

“Then the final one was the FP1 in Silverstone, which was really a reward more than anything else for what he’s been doing in F2. We have to do it for regulations, but it’s important to reward your Academy. And it was surprising actually, just how close he was to Alex in his first time out there. He loved it, he enjoyed it, but he showed good performance.”