Why Williams wants nothing more than a boring F1 practice in France

A combination of mixed weather practice at the British Grand Prix, a start-line crash for Alex Albon, and then the sprint format in Austria, has left it unable to run through the normal baseline checks it would normally do for a such a major car change.

Two normal race weekends would have given it six free practice sessions to devote as much time as it wanted for those. As it heads to France, it hasn’t been able to devote any time at all to what it needed to do.

That is why, as it finally has enough parts to run its new update on both Albon and Nicholas Latifi at this weekend’s French GP, a dry standard Friday run of checks would be the best possible outcome.

As Williams head of vehicle performance Dave Robson explains: “There’s definitely a bit of a reset. You’ve got to go through that phase where you’ve got to check that it’s behaving like the wind tunnel and simulation say it should, in terms of where you want to pitch the ride heights or anything else that affects effects the airflow.

“Ideally, we would have done that quite methodically and objectively at FP1 at Silverstone, if it hadn’t been wet.

“It would have been a pretty boring session, but we’d have collected the data, compared it to the simulations and then we would hopefully have been quite quickly up to speed with it. We didn’t get a chance to do that.

“We then chose not to do it in P2 at Silverstone, as we chose just to suck it and see, and obviously in Austria we didn’t do it in P1 because we had all the race prep work to do.

“We’ll probably have to do some of that in France, and then hopefully we can make some more rapid progress.”

While the upgraded Williams has shown decent flashes of speed when it has been unleashed, and Albon nearly got through to Q3 at the Austrian GP, the team still is unsure about just how much of an improvement the new package has delivered.

“It’s still hard to quantify,” added Robson. “Silverstone was difficult. In Austria, with just that one practice session and quite a lot of race preparation homework to get on with, we didn’t do as much of the measurement work as we would have liked.

“There’s signs of it showing promise and some good feedback from Alex. But I think we’re not there yet in terms of understanding how to get the most out of it.”

Albon said in Austria that he felt the new Williams was more ‘peaky’, which in effect means it is producing its best performance in a quite narrow…