Spate of Williams crashes ‘unlike anything I’ve seen in 25 years’

Williams team principal James Vowles says he has never experienced anything like the spate of crashes his team has endured this year.

The team have endured more incidents resulting in significant damage to their cars than any other team in 2024.

Williams ran low on spare parts early in the season after a series of crashes. Now the team has endured five major accidents in the last three rounds in Mexico, Brazil and Las Vegas.

As a result of the frequent damage to their cars, driver Franco Colapinto is using an old specification of suspension on his FW46 this weekend in Qatar.

Vowles, who joined Williams from Mercedes at the beginning of last year, admitted he had never experienced such a run of misfortune for a team in his time in F1 and that the frequency of accidents is affecting their performance.

“We’re trying to contain it as much as possible to this year so that we’re not hurting next year’s programme,” Vowles told Sky. “But when you’re at those sorts of numbers – 15 officially – what it means is you’re not focusing on adding performance and focusing on the future, you’re just redeveloping status quo. And that’s frustrating.

“In 25 years of doing this, I can’t remember anything anywhere near as bad. It is difficult, it really has been.”

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Vowles arrived at Williams at the beginning of 2023 and has started major restructuring of the team’s racing operations. Despite the setbacks, he insists that the team’s evolution will not be affected.

“Most of [the accidents] have been towards the back end of the season,” he explained. “So at that point you’re trying to more focus on the following year.

“It hasn’t slowed down the transformation we’re doing internally. We’ve already carved out enough resource to make sure we’ll focus on ’26 development. That’s within error, that doesn’t have an impact. For ’25, redeveloping how we do process and structure within all of our operations, those are being carved out and segmented so that we can still transform.

“What it has done is, there’s an amount of cost cap we’ve had to allocate to this year, which is frustrating – I wish it was into the future. And there’s an amount of diversion away from just focusing on getting things better, which for sure we’ve taken attention away from.”

Williams’ 15 incidents in 2024