James Vowles: We’re basically starting from scratch

Before the start of Saturday’s practice in Suzuka, Williams chief James Vowles spoke about the situation the team found itself in following Logan Sargent’s accident yesterday. According to him, the situation is difficult, but not critical.

James Vowles: “There is no doubt that the team is in unfavorable conditions: we don’t want to repair cars, we don’t want to produce spare parts – we mainly want to increase speed. But in the end the most important thing is that Logan is fine, the chassis is not damaged and yesterday we did everything we could and prepared a car for him that meets all the standards.

We were lucky that yesterday’s second practice session did not yield much, and today all teams must have time to complete a very extensive program – driving both short and long sets of laps, understanding the behavior of the cars on the race distance to to prepare for Sunday. But in fact, we are starting from scratch, nothing can be done, but still all the necessary work must be done.

In terms of chassis specification, Logan’s FW46 is not much different from Alex Albon’s car, but it has a slightly different front wing, but the speed difference will be minimal, the number will not be in tenths, but only in a few thousandths of a second .

We will also not have a spare chassis in China, but the Shanghai track is still easier, but Suzuka is one of the tracks that I personally like the most, but the driver has no room for mistakes here. If he is still wrong, it will lead to the same consequences as yesterday, namely: A very serious accident occurs.

Obviously we didn’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we didn’t have a spare chassis. We had planned to have it ready for the first race of the season, but we had to postpone this task until later, and in the end we found ourselves in such an unfavorable position. If you don’t have a spare chassis in Suzuka, that’s a very big risk.

But everything should be fine. Although it was initially clear that if any of the cars were damaged in the early stages of the season, we would have problems – and so it happened. But we have tried to prepare a sufficient number of spare parts, and we are also implementing a program to gradually increase the efficiency of the machine. And now our job is to ensure that we continue to have sufficient spare parts, and in that respect I like the situation very well. This allows us to both race and gradually increase the speed.”