James Vowles insists Williams ‘not on the back foot’ despite missing Barcelona shakedown

James Vowles believes Williams will not be on the “back foot” when the new season starts despite the Grove outfit missing out on the Barcelona shakedown.

Williams was the sole absentee from the week-long shakedown in Spain after delays to the car-building process prompted them to pull the plug but Vowles is confident they can still start the year on an even footing.

James Vowles maintains Williams not behind rivals

Undoubtedly, Williams is currently a step behind its rivals after the other 10 were able to get real-world experience on the Barcelona test track but a saving grace is the existence of a further two tests before the season opener in Melbourne.

And while its rivals were getting the laps in, Williams was using a Virtual Track Test (VTT) plus simulator work to at least get some data to work with.

That, along with being a Mercedes customer, has Vowles confident that when the season starts, his outfit will not be left behind.

“I would much prefer to be in Barcelona, I’m going to preempt this with that,” he told media including PlanetF1.com. “That was the goal. That was what we intended. We did not achieve it.

“However, what we did, in terms of a week worth of VTT testing, that was successful, and what we’ve been doing with both Carlos [Sainz] and Alex [Albon] whilst everyone else was in Barcelona.

“In addition, we are fortunate to the fact that Mercedes has sufficient runners that there’s quite a bit of information coming back on both the gearbox and the power unit that enables us to get ahead when we come to Bahrain.

“Which means, I do not believe with six days testing, we’ll be on back foot.

“A little bit of that’s fortune, because the engine, the power unit, is reliable, the gearbox is reliable, and the VTT testing flushed out a lot of the demons that are buried in the car.”

As for what distancing Williams is suffering from, Vowles pointed to the lack of real-world experience of Sainz and Albon but was confident that the Bahrain tests plus more simulator work meant they would not be left behind.

“What’s missing is there’s a lot of knowledge for the drivers to inherently perfect what’s going on on track,” Vowles continued.

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“What’s missing is a correlation for where aerodynamics really are. Track data is the only way of establishing that.

“So there is a loss, but with six days of testing with our driver in loop simulator that we invested in a state of the art, I’m very confident that we are able to mitigate a lot of those.”

There is though ongoing concern that Williams’ car is overweight compared to its rivals. Last week during an extraordinary press conference to detail why Williams had missed Barcelona, Vowles suggested the team would not know the correct weight until the car was built and repeated that claim during Tuesday’s launch.

“In terms of weight, until there’s two race cars built in the correct specification going forward, it’s hard to comment on that one.

“Does that stop you being competitive right now? No one knows, and I really do mean no one knows what the pecking order is, especially ourselves, can be on track. So it’s hard for me to answer that question.”

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