Alex Albon has claimed that Williams is “on the right track” as it seeks to upgrade its 2024 Formula 1 challenger, which continues to be overweight.
Williams had its best campaign since 2017 last term, finishing seventh in the Constructors’ standings with 28 points.
Still, the Grove-based outfit sought to eradicate the peaky nature of last year’s FW45 with its 2024 machine, but in doing so, the FW46 has suffered different pitfalls.
The 2024 Williams has been consistently overweight throughout the year and that has contributed to the team scoring just four points from the first 14 rounds of the season.
Albon however, remains positive, stating that significant progress has already been made in slashing the FW46’s weight, with more to come from the car.
“The team are doing a great job,” he claimed. “We’ve actually got a lot of weight out of the car.
“We’re still overweight, but nowhere near where we were to start with.”
The Anglo-Thai driver has claimed that had Williams made weight at the start of the season, the team would have been a par with Mercedes throughout the opening rounds of 2024.
Since then Mercedes has lept forward to be a genuine contender at the front of the field, leaving Williams amid its midfield battle.
With several of Williams’ competitors adding significant upgrade packages to their respective machines throughout the first 14 rounds of the season, Albon is buoyed that his outfit has kept pace amid a relatively light upgrade plan.
“If you look at how many upgrades there have been from teams around us, we haven’t had almost any major upgrades,” he said.
“We had a front wing in Japan, and then apart from that, it’s all just been weight. So, in some ways, I think it’s positive, because we haven’t put an upgrade yet on the car and we’re still able to fight close enough to points.”
Albon added “We do have an upgrade coming,” before saying Williams “don’t want to give a date to it.
“But I think that’s a good thing,” Albon explained.
“It just shows that we’re on the right track, and if anything, in some ways it proves that we would have been very competitive at the start of the year if we weren’t still overweight.
“It’s like a combination of budget and capacity, I guess. You have to make a choice, unfortunately, between weight and performance. It’s not one or the other.
“You’re trying to do both at the same time, because they go hand in hand. Performance-wise, weight’s a guaranteed improvement, but it’s also a very expensive thing to chase.
“There’s a lot of testing, crash testing, all this kind of stuff that needs to be done when you start lightening up parts. At the same time, we also need load on the car, so there’s two projects.”
Williams isn’t likely to win any big prizes across the remainder of the 2024 season, but steady improvements can be expected based on Albon’s word.
Furthermore, with Team Principal James Vowles allotting staff to focus on 2026 and beyond, the Williams project is all about building a better tomorrow at the expense of high-performance in the present.
