12 April 2024 , 10:55
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Williams' car development plans will suffer as a result of their costly early-season crashes, boss James Vowles has admitted.
The races in Melbourne and Suzuka saw three major smashes involving Williams cars. That includes Alex Albon 's crash in Australian Grand Prix practice which damaged his chassis so bad that he took Logan Sargeant 's car and forced the American to sit out the rest of the weekend.
And the Japanese Grand Prix was even more damaging. Sargeant crashed in practice, while Albon was sent into a tyre barrier on the first lap of the race after contact with Daniel Ricciardo.
Albon's car will be repaired for next weekend's Chinese Grand Prix. Vowles said: "It was a pretty major accident with Alex. The car went into the tyre wall, the deceleration was fairly large. Fortunately, both Alex and Daniel were okay. Accidents like that could end up with an injury and we didn't have that in that circumstance.
"In terms of the chassis itself, it would have been repairable trackside. However, we can do a far better job by sending it here back to the UK. It will be a lighter repair than what we would have been to do there and a more complete repair as well. So there is damage, but nothing that we can't repair and we'll have the car back in China as a result."
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But there is concern about how these repair jobs could impact the team's plans for the rest of the season. Because they have had to work on the existing chassis, it means they have not had time to build the spare that would have prevented that scenario in Melbourne when Sargeant wasn't able to race.
Even more of a concern is the budget cap. All teams build in a buffer for crash damage when calculating their expected expenditure for a season, but Williams have already racked up more than £1.5million in repair bills. With 20 more race weekends still to navigate, they have to expect - and plan for - that figure to rise further still.
If it looks likely to put them over the budget cap, they will have to lower their car development expenditure instead to make sure they comply with the rules. And Vowles has admitted that is likely to be necessary as a result of these early-season smashes.
He added: "The more significant item is probably that, across the last two races, we've lost a number of floors, a number of rear wings, a number of front wings. Suspension components, gearboxes have been impacted as well... It will have an impact on what we do performance-wise later on in the year.
"The performance components that we brought forward through hard work to Japan are unfortunately destroyed. So, again, that puts us on the back foot for performance across the next few races while we build up stock of those again. So a little bit of a short-term, a little bit of a medium-term impact on where we are."