With the ground effect regulations era reaching its final year, Williams finally seems to have developed a fair understanding of the concept. With 70 points in the first 14 rounds of the season, the James Vowles-led team is sitting comfortably at the top of the midfield. However, before they could take a breather going into the mid-season break, the Hungarian GP laid bare some key weaknesses.
Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon never looked comfortable enough to match the pace they managed to achieve on several other circuits. As the Hungarian GP weekend progressed to qualifying, Albon suffered a Q1 exit. The Thai driver was P20, just one week after taking P5 at the Belgian GP qualifying.
While his teammate Sainz managed to get into Q2, he too could not make much of it. Finishing the session P13, the Spaniard failed to give himself much of an advantage to score points on Sunday as the car packed pace.
The poor race pace saw Sainz finish the Hungarian GP a place lower than his starting position. Albon, meanwhile, put up a fight but the disadvantage of starting in P20 saw him move no higher than P15. Both drivers were among the 10 lapped by the race leader.
Williams aware of key weakness that ruined F1 Hungarian GP but won’t fix it: Vowles
The result was a consequence of a weakness that Williams is well aware of. Surprisingly, Vowles is willing to let it go unfixed. The Williams team principal made it clear that it was a conscious sacrifice for the 2026 car.
“So Budapest, if you look at a track map, you’ll sort of see it quite quickly. There’s a lot of corners that are quite rounded where you go into the corner and you have sustained lateral G for a long period of time. And it’s a weakness that we highlighted back in Barcelona,” he said on The Vowles Verdict.
“It’s a weakness that I think will be there in Qatar for transparency as well. But it’s an element of our car that we know is a weakness, but it’s not something we’ll invest and fix in 2025. It’s something we very much look forward to in 2026 and have some aspects of the car that are fixing this.”
Vowles maintained that the team’s focus remains on the 2026 car. In pursuance of that plan, they won’t invest “precious resources” to optimize performance on a few circuits in 2025. He reiterated the stance while answering another fan question.
“We have a really good understanding of where the weakness is. There’s actually three, sort of four characteristics all playing into each other, which all got exposed in Budapest. As I already mentioned, our focus is on 2026. The car we have now is the car that we will have to the end of the year,” said Vowles.
“That’s a conscious decision because next year is a clean sheet of paper that we can tear everything up, start again and do a really good job of the foundation. So it’s important that we take that stride.”
While it is clear that Williams has ruled out any fundamental design changes until the end of the season, Vowles maintains that the team hasn’t given up on the rest of this season.
Vowles lists circuits where Williams can bounce back strongly after Hungarian GP stumble
Referring to Williams’ previous performances, Vowles has listed three circuits where Sainz and Albon can fight for a big points haul. Those three are Zandvoort, Monza, and Baku.
“Zandvoort is a track where we qualified incredibly well a few years ago. We’ve raced there well for the last few years and I’m confident this car will do the same again this year. Monza, a track where again, we tend to have our high point score but the characteristics of the car again should be strong there.
“And then finally going to Baku, again last year if you remember, double points finish for us and a strong track. So those are just the next three,” Vowles opined.
While these are the three circuits he is banking on, Vowles has urged the team to optimize performance on other circuits as well. He believes that if the right tweaks are made to the setup and the strategy supports, they won’t have another Budapest again.
“What we have to make sure we do is get our reliability, our build, our operations, our strategy, our drivers together. Everything coming together to make sure we maximise our point score. So that issue in Budapest won’t come out.”
Vowles admits to having mixed feelings about the season so far
Vowles’ addition to Williams has finally started paying its dividends. The team has shrugged off its backmarker status and is back fighting in the midfield. With 70 points, they are ahead of the likes of Aston Martin and just behind fourth-placed Red Bull. Vowles acknowledges this achievement and highlights that the team has pulled it off for the first time in a decade or so.
At the same time, he remains critical of the missed opportunities. He listed out the Grands Prix where the strategy, crashes, or reliability let him down and cost them big points.
“So how I feel, first of all, mixed emotions. I’m very proud of where we come from. We have to remember this is our best start of the season for over a decade and we’ve done well to score a good number of points on our journey here. So that’s the positive aspect of things,” he said.
“The negative is always when I reflect back on certain races. Imola being one with strategy. With Carlos, Miami being another, which is a combination of accident, car damage and conditions. We have more points that we could have scored across those two events where the car was performing very, very well.
“And the same in Austria. We had a reliability fault with Alex when the car was running P6. So I know there’s real tangible points we’ve left on the table and in a close for championship as it is, that’s painful.”
Despite the big points loss, Vowles remains motivated. He remains confident in the abilities of the car and believes it will perform well on most circuits. Regardless, he is wary of the competition awaiting him and the team.
“Nothing beats a fast car. And I’m confident the car we have across most of the circuits remaining for the rest of the year will be competitive. We have a duty and responsibility to score as many points as we can in that journey,” Vowles concluded.
