Williams must intervene after quantity of crashes: 'No one took this into account'
F1 News
Williams had to reorganise their cost cap allocation after a number of crashes the team already had to repair in the current F1 season, team principal James Vowles explained in Qatar. The last one was on Friday in Las Vegas, when Franco Colapinto crashed his car hard, with an impact of 50G.
After completing a great effort to recover their damaged cars after the Brazil GP, another major task awaited the Williams crew in Las Vegas. In qualifying, Colapinto damaged his car heavily. "There's no doubt about it. I think teams aren't built to take, what, six major crashes. Generally speaking, we'll hold a stock of parts that's about four, maybe five of each component. That's about where you want to be. And so it doesn't take long to figure out that once you crash five or six of them, you're in trouble. Huge effort by both the trackside team and those in the factory," Vowles began.
"I've had people that are part-time or even on shift work just asking what more they can they do to come in and do it. And that's an incredible feeling when you're part of an organisation that goes above and beyond to make sure we have two racing cars on the grid every week. It's a distraction away from '25, there's no doubt about it. Not so much from '26, but you have to pull your effort into just making sure you're here on track fighting with your competitors around you."
Vowles on the cost cap for 2025
Logan Sargeant was replaced by Colapinto following the Dutch Grand Prix. The Argentinian driver was more consistent in the beginning, but now have crashed two weekends in a row as well. Vowles then explained how these crashes affect the team in terms of their budget allocation to fit within the cost cap.
"It’s you're effectively just moving elements around from what you can do it no one here would have accounted I hope anyway for this amount of attrition this late on the season so the implication is you have to take a little bit away from next year’s cost cap."
"We have elements that we're fixing for the long term, which is around process structure, infrastructure. It doesn't hinder on any of those. And those are the big gains. What we're talking about is a few hundreds of thousands that I wish we weren't spending this year that we could spend next year," Vowles concluded at the press conference.
This article was written in collaboration with Estéban den Toom
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