Watch onboard as Latifi drives the Williams FW44

Jamie Woodhouse
Nicholas Latifi drives the Williams FW44. England, February 2022.

Onboard with Nicholas Latifi driving the Williams FW44 at Silverstone. England, February 2022.

Williams showed us what their 2022 challenger, the FW44, looks like onboard, courtesy of Nicholas Latifi.

The 2022 campaign is a critical one for Williams as the Grove outfit look to continue their rise back up the Formula 1 pecking order.

And potentially working in their favour will be the majorly revised regulations for this new season, which have formed the basis for 2022 cars that are looking far different to their 2021 predecessors.

Since all of the teams are starting from a blank sheet of paper, it creates the opportunity for some major gainers but also the risk of slipping backwards, so Williams will hope the FW44 is their ticket up the order having finished the 2021 season P8 in the Constructors’ Championship.

And although the team used a show car for their 2022 launch, later in the day they took the real FW44 out onto the Silverstone track for its first shakedown run.

Now we are able to see it in action from the onboard camera as Latifi put the FW44 through its paces on a very wet Silverstone circuit.

From the onboard footage, we can see Williams have retained the approach of mounting the dash above the steering wheel, something their head of vehicle performance, Dave Robson, discussed last season.

Robson said at the time Williams had “looked at” building the dash into the steering wheel like other teams, but “decided it wasn’t really worth the effort and it was absolutely fine where it is, stationary”.

Another striking difference already from the onboard is the size of the wheels, which for 2022 Pirelli have upgraded to 18 inches instead of the 13-inch compounds from years past.

Many drivers are already predicting these bigger wheels, along with the covers that are new for 2022 also, will prove to be a problem when it comes to visibility at certain circuits.

Indeed, judging from the onboard footage, it is already very apparent where the drivers are coming from with those worries.

 

Latifi and his Williams team-mate Alex Albon were among the pool of drivers with such concerns.

More will be understood about that situation and the cars themselves once the teams begin the group shakedown in Spain at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya from February 23-25.

 

Albon free to ‘use all’ Red Bull knowledge to help Williams

Alex Albon is free to use any knowledge that he has from Red Bull to help Williams.

 

Williams

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