Surprised, Williams goes. Vowles satisfied: “The goal was to cover kilometres”

Finally good news After so many clouds a ray of sunshine finally appears in the Williams sky in 2026. The sensational flop in Barcelona, ​​with the team not showing up at the collective shakedown-test days organized by F1 and the team on the Catalan track at the end of January, now seems a little further away. In fact, on the first day of testing in Bahrain, Williams clocked up more kilometers than anyone else, completing a total of 145 laps divided almost equally between Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon. A breath of fresh air for a team that was already under the magnifying glass as a possible disappointment of this new regulatory cycle. Vowles’ comment “It was a positive day for us in terms of mileage covered – commented Vowles at the end of Wednesday’s afternoon session – our objective was simply to cover the necessary mileage to learn and understand how the chassis and powertrain work and to start eliminating problems from the system. There will be many of them and these next three days will serve to lay a good foundation on which to work and then improve performance. As for the car, I can say that it has no defects, there is nothing particularly poor, but clearly we need to delve into the details.” “An interesting element we found is that the wind is completely different from what we have had on all the other occasions we have been here – highlighted the Williams team principal – it is an east, south-east wind, which creates some problems for us, especially at turn 1 and turn 10. For the rest, the comments from the drivers so far are decidedly positive. The balance does not seem too far from ideal and this without any fine-tuning work, so we have a good starting point for the next few days”.