Relief washed over the Williams camp ahead of this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix following the team’s reception of its long-awaited FW46 spare chassis.
Production delays had left the Grove-based outfit without a third chassis for the first few races, creating logistical headaches.
Unfortunately, a practice crash for Alex Albon in Australia forced Williams to swap the Anglo-Thai racer into teammate Logan Sargeant's car, a plight that further highlighted the need for a backup.
Despite subsequent crashes in Japan, team principal James Vowles confirmed on Friday that the team’s third car is now ready for action, although he hoped that it would remain "in a box" for the rest of the season.
“What I can confirm is, despite all those big crashes we've had at beginning of the year, the third car is all here and it's ready to go as well,” Vowles said, speaking at a Williams Fan Zone event in Miami.
“I hope it stays in a box for the next 18 races!”
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Along with Alpine and Sauber, Williams has yet to score its first top-ten finish this season. However, on pure pace the team’s FW46 has performed better than its rivals, but the incidents it suffered coupled with the tight battle within F1’s mid-field have weighed significantly on its results.
“There's no other words to say it: there is potential but we haven't realised any of it at all,” commented Vowles.
“We've had a number of accidents that have been pretty big in the grand scheme of things.
“To lay out what's happened across Australia and Japan, we've lost three floors, three front wings, three rear wings, [and had] three gearboxes completely destroyed. That's normally what you lose in a year, not two races.
©Williams
“As an F1 team, what we try and do is not build too many of one component, because when you do, you're continuously trying to change it throughout the year.
“We've already got a new front suspension now and we have a new floor coming in two weeks’ time. So, you try not to build 10 of them, you build three or four of them.
“When you lose three of them, that just means you've now got to build three or four more whilst you try and get your stock up. And that put us on the back foot a little bit, I think it's fair to say.”
With Williams’ spare car situation now resolved, Vowles suggested that resources can now be channeled towards performance upgrades.
“We didn't bring performance when we should have brought performance, we were just trying to bring the stock back up,” he said. “That's behind us. Now that's gone.
“The start of the season was not where we wanted it to be. But everything gets reset and we move forward from now.
“What I can say is there was a lot of performance potential in this car and a lot more performance coming across the next five or six races. Every race we will just start to bring performance now.”
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