The latest crash suffered by a Williams driver will delay their upgrade programme later in the season.
Team principal James Vowles admitted that was an inevitable consequence of Alexander Albon’s first-lap crash with Daniel Ricciardo in yesterday’s Japanese Grand Prix.
“The last two weeks have been tough,” Vowles told the official F1 channel. “I think, take any team, to have three major accidents where you pretty much take out all the equipment on the car is enormous.
“Taking that across the season, you can deal with it. Taking it across just a few races, it’s difficult and the impact of it will be what you expect.
“We’re making spares as quickly as possible in the background but ultimately performance will have an impact on that. We can’t bring as many updates. The updates that were on the car, unfortunately, are broken. So we’ve got to build those stocks back up and get going again.”
Logan Sargeant had to revert to Williams’ previous specification aerodynamics after crashing his car during first practice on Friday. He sat out the previous race in Australia after Albon crashed at the beginning of the weekend, leaving the team with a single useable car.
But Vowles is confident Williams can rebound from its latest setback in time for the Chinese Grand Prix next week. “One of the huge strengths of this organisation is resilience,” he said. “It’s been through so much across the last ten years. We’re going to pick ourselves up and get going again.”
He was also pleased by Sargeant’s performance in yesterday’s race, before he lost a significant amount of time when he spun off at Degner 2 on lap 41.
“What I’m encouraged by is Logan in that race was fighting for it against other competitors around him, same age tyres, and overtaking them,” said Vowles. “That just gives me encouragement that the race package we have isn’t bad.
“We weren’t there in Melbourne, but here we were there or thereabouts and it’s incredibly tight all the way from basically [RB] from us to Alpine. There’s nothing between those teams. The encouragement I take is that we’re going to pick ourselves back up, come to China and come back swinging.”
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2024 Japanese Grand Prix
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