Williams F1 struggled late in the season to have sufficient parts, with numerous accidents. Dave Robson, the team’s performance director, admits that the crashes in the penultimate hat-trick of races were not anticipated in terms of stock.
“It’s very difficult” Robson said. “It is clear that in tackling two series of three races, we should ideally have gone to the first of these races with everything we needed to cover all six races and let the race team be relatively self-sufficient for 7 to 8 weeks and let the factory focus on making parts for next year.”
“Clearly we have not been able to do this and therefore have had to mobilize the factory to manufacture spare parts to cover the last three races, which will impact the production schedule of next year.”
“But we will be able to catch up on that, so I don’t think it will have a lasting effect, but it’s really tricky, and the cost cap aspect is a challenge – you leave some margin knowing that there will be some attrition, but when it’s a lot, you have to cut back somewhere else pretty clearly.”
Robson assures that there is no delay in the development of the 2025 and 2026 single-seaters because of this. This may have been the case during the season, but only production was impacted at the end of the season: “Regarding the development of the 2025 and 2026 single-seaters, there is no impact, it is only at the production level.”
“We could have started making some parts a little earlier, whether they were R&D test parts for the 2026 car or parts for next year’s race car.”
“I don’t think it will have an impact on the starting specification of next year’s car, it’s just that we would have liked to get a little further ahead of production than we did.”
Williams wants to avoid the difficulties of the races at the start of the season: “We don’t hope so, but it’s possible. This year, procedural changes and delays meant we worked until the eleventh hour to get our cars ready in time for pre-testing. season.”
“This led to a reduction in spare parts and Logan’s withdrawal from the Australian GP in favor of Alex after he destroyed a chassis in testing. We should avoid this.”
