James Vowles Reveals Williams Weakness Being Exposed by Brutal Barcelona GP Conditions

Barcelona has never been shy about separating the wheat form the chaff, and right now it’s doing exactly that to Williams. James Vowles conceded ahead of the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix that the FW48’s weight problem – something the Grove squad has been managing since before the season even started – hurts significantly more at a hot, high-demand circuit than it did at Monaco or Montreal.

The admission came when former F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve put a pointed question to Vowles: “You just said, three different tracks, the car was kind of good on all three different tracks. Does that mean the car is not peaky enough, or does that mean it’s easy to set up so it will be good everywhere?”

Vowles answered: “It’s more… we’ve already said this, the car is overweight. This track punishes you in these temperatures for just not being on the weight limit. We’ll fix that as the year goes on, but that gets accentuated. The warmer it is, the closer you are to that neutral balance you were talking about and the overheating, the more that gets accentuated.

“So here, that’s really punishing us. In Monaco, it doesn’t as much. Montreal, it doesn’t as much. We have to recognize that too. But it’s more, actually, we’ve got a really wide range of balance we can put on the car. That doesn’t worry me particularly.

“We’re missing some peak downforce compared to the front runners, there’s no doubt about that. And again, in these warm conditions, it exposes you.”

The FW48 is understood to be around 28kg above the 768kg minimum weight limit, a hangover from a chaotic winter build that forced the team to accept a heavy car in order to make the grid at all.

Once time ran short, weight effectively became the compromise – parts were made heavier to ensure they passed crash tests and kept the programme moving.

What Vowles is describing now is the consequence of that compromise playing out in the worst possible environment .