Absent from the shakedowns in Barcelona and results in the tests in Bahrain were not comforting: from Williams a significant result could not be expected at the first GP of the 2026 season Australiaand so it was. The two drivers of the Grove team in fact finished outside the points zone, with the “best” placing obtained by Alex Albon.
The British placed his FW48 in 12th positionconfirming the difficulties that the team is going through at the start of the championship: “It was a long race for us today – he commented – at the moment we are in a no man’s land and we are not fighting against the center of the packhowever our strategy was good, but it is clear that we lack the pace. From the lap times it is clear that we are overweight and not producing enough downforce, and graining was also an issue for us today, especially on the hard tyres. Realistically we know where we can find the lap time and the team is working tirelessly on an aggressive plan to get us closer to where we want to be. A positive aspect of today is that we have accumulated kilometers and that we have overcome some reliability issues in previous sessions, but we will learn as much as we can from this weekend to apply it next time in Shanghai.”
Statements that join those of his teammate Carlos Sainz, 15° and he too is fully aware of all the work that the team will have to carry out starting from the next Chinese GP: “It was a difficult weekend, with too many problems in each session – added the former Ferrari driver – we had a great start and I managed to climb up to twelfth position in the first laps. Unfortunately, we had a problem with the front wing which caused us to lose all aerodynamic balance and the understeer I built up meant we started to degrade the tires significantly. From then on it became a test session for me, to be honest. This front wing problem is nothing new and we need to focus on resolving this type of issue quickly if we want to improve in the short term. We still have a lot of work to do, but I’m confident we can come up with a good plan to make these improvements.”
