Williams team principal James Vowles has explained why they did not have a spare car available this weekend, which has led to Logan Sargeant missing the race.
Sargeant’s team mate Alexander Albon crashed heavily during the first practice session. That left Williams with only one chassis for the remainder of the weekend as Albon’s FW46 cannot be repaired at the track and the team have no spare car.
“The damage was extensive,” said Vowles in a video produced by the team. “The gearbox is split in two, the power unit has significant damage to it and the chassis was damaged beyond repair at the track on the front-right corner.
“The main thing for me is that Alex is okay after that incident. It was a huge accident, you will have seen on TV just the amount of debris spread across the track and always in those circumstances, the driver’s health comes first.”
Williams pushed its car development deadline later than most teams, even opting not to conduct a shakedown of its new car before flying out to Bahrain for pre-season testing at the opening round. Vowles said the late completion of the cars meant that even by the third round of the championship, four weeks since the season started, they do not have a spare available.
“As a result of the work that took place across the winter, we stressed the organisation to the absolute limits,” he said. “We pushed everything as far as it could do and what it meant as a result of that is off the back end of being very late on some of the production, the spare chassis [completion date] starts to move backwards.
“No team plans to come to an event without a spare chassis. In doing so you create risk. In the absolute best case, it’s uncomfortable. In the worst case, one of the cars is not racing and that’s the situation we face today.
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“We have to ensure that we never, ever put ourselves in that situation again going forward in the future. We are here to go racing and to only have one car here on Saturday and Sunday simply isn’t what we’re built to do.”
Vowles, who took charge at Williams early last year, explained why he made the “difficult” call to take Sargeant out of his car and put Albon in it.
“I’ve made the decision for Logan not to be racing this weekend and for Alex to take the chassis and continue on behalf of Williams Racing on…
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