Vowles: Sometimes we were slower than Sauber and Alpine

Williams Racing chief James Vowles openly admitted after a failed performance in Australia that his team was in trouble and that its position had become seriously complicated after the third stage of the season.

James Vowles: “I know our car has potential, but we just can’t use it. However, previously there were other reasons: either the power plant overheated, as was the case in Bahrain, or the conditions during the race were unfortunate when we got into traffic.

But in Australia it was different: we simply didn’t have enough speed in the race. There were moments during the Grand Prix when we were clearly slower than the Sauber and Alpine cars. Serious difficulties are explained precisely by this, and there are two aspects to it.

First, the left front tire was subjected to intense granulation. This happened to most cars from other teams, but in our case the problem was more noticeable. Secondly, the rear tires also overheated massively.

Now we need to find out why we performed so poorly in Melbourne, even though our FW 46 was more competitive than in the first two rounds of the season, while most teams brought the same cars to Australia as in the previous races.

The Japanese Grand Prix is ​​coming up, where we will have to work with harder rubber compounds than in Melbourne, and I think this will help to some extent. Moreover, the Suzuka circuit has completely different characteristics and I don’t think the problems we are experiencing now will be repeated there.

But after the Japanese stage we will have a race in Shanghai, where the difficulties associated with granulation may be repeated. And our first priority is to understand as quickly as possible what we can do to prevent this.

In addition, the events of yesterday’s race also reflect the fact that we did not complete a long series of laps on the hard tires in Friday practice. Alex Albon didn’t have that chance because his car was totaled, and in Logan Sargent’s case we had to run a long series on soft tires because his set of Medium tires was damaged.

Since we were unable to collect such important information, we had to pay for it for the remaining days of the weekend. Obviously, all this puts us back to last place in the team championship. We are only 8th, while our rivals (Haas F1) earned four points yesterday.

It only depends on us whether we can solve all the problems and start fighting for higher positions. But the rivalry promises to be extremely intense until the end of the championship.”