"Fundamental issues" still need "to be resolved," claims Vowles

Despite strong performances through the first half of the 2025 F1 season, Williams team boss James Vowles conceded that that there are still fundamental technical issues that still need "to be resolved" if the British squad wants to be competitive on every kind of circuit.

Williams have enjoyed a hugely successful season so far in 2025. While the British team struggled for pace in recent season, but they have managed to raise their competitiveness for the current season.

The Grove-based squad had collected a total of 55 points so far over the opening ten rounds of the season, and sit fifth in the teams' standings. Although fourth-placed Red Bull are far ahead with their 162 points, sixth-placed Haas are 27 points adrift of Williams. The team's best result was a fifth place which it achieved three times so far, with Alex Albon having scored all three fifth-place finishes at Melbourne, Miami and Imola.

The only exceptions to Williams' current brilliant form were the Bahrain and the Spanish Grands Prix where the British outfit failed to score a single point.

As for the Spanish round, Williams had arrived at Barcelona with low expectations as they had expected their FW47 to struggle on a circuit which traditionally exposes their cars in recent years.

The qualifying session saw Carlos Sainz get knocked out in Q1 while his team-mate Alexander Albon failed to progress into the final segment. The race then turned out to be a tough afternoon for Williams.

Albon had contact at the start and was forced wide. The Thai driver did not only lose several places, but he was also forced to pit for a new front wing. He had a further contact later on as he collided with Racing Bulls driver Liam Lawson.

The incident resulted in another front wing damage for Albon and he was also handed a 10-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage. After serving his penalty, he elected to retire from the race.

His team-mate also had contact on the first lap which led to front wing damage. With his damage having been a smaller one, Sainz refused to pit for a new wing, but he lost performance as a result of it.

Although he finished the race, he failed to score any points at his home race where he has always finished in the points since the start of his F1 career.

Reflecting on Williams' current form, team boss James Vowles reckoned that while the Grove-based team has performed well so far in 2025, there are still weaknesses that need to be solved.

"There's plenty of positives to take away from Barcelona. I enjoy events that remind us that we have to keep digging deep and scrapping that we haven't fixed everything we need to on our journey back towards the front.

"And Barcelona does exactly that. It exposed, I would say, two really quite fundamental issues that are still yet to be resolved to the right level within our car.

"That's a good thing because that being exposed creates opportunity to run several tests and several diagnostic afterwards in order to ensure that as we go to future events this year that we'll have similar corner profiles, understand whether we have made any move forward or not and perhaps more importantly make sure that we're running something into 26 where we're looking at these issues and rectifying them.

With Victor Martins having driven Alex Albon's car in the opening practice session, Williams were able to fit the FW47 with a host of aero rakes that allowed the British outfit to gain further data on the aerodynamic behaviour of its 2025 F1 car.

"We had Victor running in Alex's car in FP1 and we took the opportunity to run two rakes that you may have seen, one on the front axle, one on the rear axle, just allowing us to characterize and understand some of the characteristics we're seeing here, particularly in Barcelona, more than other tracks.

"And the data we got from that is good. It's still being analyzed as we speak, but it's core to understanding what we need to be doing going forward in order to rectify the issue. The other positives were we were really dead last year and that wasn't the case this yea