Williams confess they don’t know yet what happened to make them miss the Barcelona test – This week, Williams revealed their 2026 livery complete with partners adorning the historic blue colours of the Grove based Formula One team. They missed the Barcelona test last week in what many believe may prove disastrous for the British racing marque.

Missing a pre-season test is usually sign of big trouble ahead and Williams were the last team to do so back in 2019 when they were absent from the first 2.5 days in Barcelona. Prior to this, Force India (now Aston Martin) had a shocker of a pre-season, finding themselves absent from the first two complete tests in Jerez and Barcelona in 2015.

The same year the soon to be defunct Marrusia missed the entire pre-season along with the opening weekend in Melbourne, going on to score no points all year before a name change yo Manor.

 

 

 

Missing Barcelona not a positive step

So however, James Vowles chooses to spin the matter, missing the Barcelona test was a huge negative for the Williams team. However, unlike Aston Martin who merely failed to set themselves proper deadlines for  sign off on technical aspects of the car not giving production enough time to ready them for Barcelona, Williams did indeed make a choice to miss the Barcelona test to invest their time in something they believed would be more productive.

The Aston Martin AMR26 limped onto the track late on Thursday completing just five laps, before the final day in the hands of Fernando Alonso another 49 laps were added. Yet the Williams announcement the week before the cars were due to hit the track in the Catalan capital was nuanced. 

“Atlassian Williams F1 Team has taken the decision not to participate in next week’s shakedown test in Barcelon…. The team will instead conduct a series of tests including a VTT [Virtual Track Testing] programme next week with the 2026 car to prepare for the first official test in Bahrain and the first race of the season in Melbourne,” read a statement from the team.

For fans of the famous old British F1 team., the news came as a blow falling Williams finest season in 2025 in recent memory. They scored more points than in the three previous year’s combined and finished an impressive 5th, behind the leading four McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.

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Drivers missed chance to test energy management

So to miss the opening pre-season test was a huge disappointment for the engineers and fans of Williams alike. Yet unlike Aston Martin who were scrabbling around to assemble their car, Williams will have done a significant amount of learning with their virtual track test.

In terms of the new Mercedes power unit, Vowles revealed: “[We were] using a correlated package from HPP [Mercedes High Performance Powertrains], correlated to running in Barcelona,” Vowles explained. “Whilst there’s many things that will help us on track, and definitely for the drivers they need the forces, what we’re replicating is pretty much there in terms of them playing around with energy management.”

Indeed as Lewis Hamilton has maintained throughout his career, the lack of forces on a drivers body in the simulator means their instinctive responses are tainted and this leads to a more drive by numbers kind of approach.

In addition, Williams absence from the Circuit de Catalunya meant they missed out on trying out the various energy management approaches possible in terms of deployment and harvesting electrical power. Yet Vowles believes this is no great loss because, “every track is so different that the specifics of Barcelona don’t necessarily carry on through into Bahrain or Melbourne.”

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Vowels says: “plenty of time”

Of course when the F1 circus arrives in Europe for its first race this year in Barcelona, Williams will suffer a knowledge deficit to the rest of the field given the hundreds of laps most of them put in. On the positive front, Vowles explained: “The power unit is reliable, and the gearbox is reliable, and the VTT testing flushed out a lot of the demons that are buried in the car.”

“What’s missing is there’s a lot of knowledge for the drivers to inherently perfect what’s going on track. What’s missing is a correlation for where aerodynamics really are and a correlation for where our vehicle dynamics really are. So track data is the only way of establishing that,” added the Williams boss.

Whilst missing the Barcelona test was less than ideal, Vowles believes in the six further days coming in Bahrain, his team will have plenty of catch up time available. Given that McLaren, Mercedes and Alpine were out there in Barcelona, pushing their Mercedes HPP powertrains along, Williams have more data than do the Red Bull teams on how their power unit, gearbox and associated hydraulics are working – as these are all components they buy from Mercedes.

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“Never again!”

The Williams boss has vowed to operate a forensic investigation into what exactly went wrong rather than dump the issue at the door and move on as quickly as possible. “If we just skirted the issue, it doesn’t hurt enough that you really get deep into the wound and fix it,” he said. “This will never happen again, because we are going to dig into it properly and make sure that we learn from absolutely every one of these issues.  You’ve got to deal with failure. If you just leave it aside or put your head down, you won’t learn from it. You have to let the pain of that failure drive your change,”  Vowles concludes.

That’s a big claim to make, “this will never happen again” given presently Williams are unsure exactly how they found themselves where they were. There may have been external forces out of Williams control involved and until the investigation is complete, the team have no proper explanation of why they found themselves on the outside looking in at the first pre-season outing.

 

 

 

Why the Indian governments stance has shifted over their ditched F1 Grand Prix

In 2023 the country of India became theist populated on earth, taking over from China. And in economic terms too the financial winds are driving growth in the sub-continent now faster than the tiger that was the Chinese economy.

One huge advantage for the economy is the mass of labour on offer with the workforce age now averaging just 29 years. By way of contrast China’s population and workforce is in decline, with an average age of 38.

India is finally waking up and starting to take its place amongst the geo-political powers of the world and as TJ13 reported yesterday the government is keen to revive the defunct F1 Indian Grand Prix. The race was held for just three years between 2011-13 before financial difficulties forced the hosts to renege on their deal with Bernie Ecclestone…. READ MORE