Nico Rosberg is not sugar-coating what has happened at Grove.
“Unfortunately, because they were in such a great place in recent years, they were really making progress, and we really thought they were moving towards the top six or top eight again permanently, and now they’ve dropped back massively, which is a bit of a shocker,” the 2016 world champion told Sky Sports F1.
Williams sit ninth in the constructors’ standings with 11 points from 14 rounds, ahead of only Aston Martin and Cadillac. Twelve months on from Carlos Sainz’s P3 in Baku, which ended an eight-year wait for a full-race podium, the team is heading back to Azerbaijan as a backmarker.
Vowles: the winter still costs us every weekend
Team principal James Vowles is not pretending upgrades will fix it. Two new chassis, built to bring the car back under the weight limit, arrive with the team at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix on 26-28 September, alongside a package of aerodynamic parts.
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“We accept the compromise to this year, and it stems from what happened over the winter, and we weren’t able to recuperate to the level we wanted,” Vowles said.
“There is a however. The field has moved on so significantly and these upgrades, whilst powerful, simply won’t be what we are looking for in order to consistently score points.”
He was equally blunt when asked what the rest of the calendar looks like.
“It’s been a tough year, and it will continue to be a tough year to the end,” Vowles told reporters.
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“There’s just no two ways about it. A lot of the mistakes that we made across the winter period will stay with us all the way until the end of this year.”
“There’ll be small steps this year, but they won’t be enough to put us to even the bare minimum of where I’d like to be, which is scoring points for a weekend.”
An overweight car and three tenths a lap
Rosberg’s diagnosis is that Williams over-reached with the new car. The team tried a bold chassis concept for the sweeping 2026 regulations and ended up carrying weight it could not shed.
“Williams just messed up the winter. They messed up the winter developing this new car. They tried to be very ambitious in the way they were building the chassis, tried to go new ways, really innovate,” Rosberg said.
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“It ended up backfiring, and they’ve got a lot too much weight on the car. And remember that 10kg of extra weight in this sport is three tenths of a second per lap.”
The Spanish Grand Prix earlier this month underlined the deficit. Alex Albon qualified 16th and finished 15th; Sainz qualified 17th, took a three-place grid penalty and retired after 43 laps with floor damage.
The pivot to 2027 is already done
The rest of the season is, in effect, a rehearsal for next year. Vowles said Williams have “invested a lot already into next year and beyond”, and that the team should “move forward on the grid” in 2027, though he added that it “will still be a tough old slog”.
Rosberg framed the challenge in personal terms for the man who joined from Mercedes in February 2023.
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“It’s a tough moment also for James Vowles, who I rate so highly, but he’s really got to fight through this struggle now and turn things around and bring the team back towards a positive direction, which is not easy,” he said.
Both drivers are staying to see the rebuild through: Albon and Sainz have re-signed for 2027. First, though, they take the two new chassis to Baku, where Williams last stood on a podium a year ago and now hopes only to run inside the weight limit.
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