HALF TERM REPORT: Williams – Early-season chassis dramas cause a headache, but will their long-term approach pay off?

Williams enjoyed a mini resurgence in 2023 as James Vowles took the Grove operation from the bottom of the F1 standings to seventh position during his first season as team boss. It’s fair to say 2024 has been more challenging so far, including a chassis shortage that dramatically forced one of their cars to miss a race. Here’s the famous outfit’s half-term report…

• Read all the 2024 half term reports here

Best finish

Alex Albon – 9th in Monaco and Britain

If we roll it back a year, Williams had amassed a very respectable 21 points after 14 rounds of the 2023 season, including standout P7 finishes in Canada – where a raft of particularly useful updates were introduced – and Italy.

But the team have just four points to their name at the same stage in 2024, with Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes and Aston Martin often locking out the points-paying positions and leaving the midfield pack with little to play for.

When opportunities have arisen, though, Alex Albon has been there to take them, underlined by P9 finishes in Monaco – where he did 90% of the job by nailing qualifying – and on home soil in Britain during a weekend of tricky, mixed weather conditions.

Albon is the only Williams driver to finish inside the top 10 places on race day this season, having scored 31 of the squad’s 32 points since teaming up with Logan Sargeant, who will lose his seat to outgoing Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz next year.

Qualifying head-to-head

Albon 13-0 Sargeant

Albon has continued his 100% qualifying record over Sargeant so far this season, with the Thai-British racer lapping faster than his American counterpart in all 35 of the standard qualifying sessions they have contested as team mates.

That said, Sargeant has shown flashes of speed on occasion, such as in Hungary where he was just over a tenth slower than Albon, while he managed to get the better of the sister car during the Sprint Qualifying sessions in Miami and Austria.

READ MORE: Crying at Disneyland, Verstappen’s cat-sitting duties and finger puppets – Getting to know the real Alex Albon

Race head-to-head

Albon 10-2 Sargeant

Albon holds a similarly strong advantage in the race day head-to-heads, having logged worse results than Sargeant on only two occasions (when he retired and his team mate made the chequered flag). If we only take races that both drivers finished, he leads 9-0.

It should be mentioned that Sargeant missed an opportunity to compete at all in Australia, where chassis dramas (more on that in a moment) limited the team to a one-car entry for qualifying and the race, and they decided that Albon was the driver who should be at the wheel.

Best moment

Given some seismic news at the start of the summer break, it’s worth splitting the best moment of Williams’ season into two parts – taking into account both on and off track matters.

On track, it would be the aforementioned pair of P9 qualifying and race results for Albon in Monaco and Britain, which have crucially put Williams ahead of the point-less Kick Sauber in the constructors’ standings at the halfway mark of the season.

READ MORE: Williams explain how ‘demanding’ and ‘daunting’ Sainz will help ‘shake us up’ as a team

Off track, the news that Sainz opted to sign with Williams for 2025 – rather than Audi’s new F1 project or Alpine – is a massive win for the team, both in terms of the short-term impact he can have and the confidence it places in Vowles’ long-term plans.

Worst moment

As touched on a few paragraphs above, the Australian Grand Prix weekend turned into a nightmare for Williams after Albon’s heavy crash during final practice brought a rather embarrassing chassis shortage to the fore.

It became clear shortly after the incident that Williams did not have a spare chassis available and, with no hope of repairing Albon’s heavily damaged one trackside, the team could only field a single car for the remainder of the weekend – Sargeant being the one to miss out.

Fans offered differing views on the decision, with some backing Albon as the most likely points scorer and others questioning why Sargeant was sidelined by an accident he didn’t cause, and it was no doubt the most challenging event for Vowles to navigate since taking on the role.

Going forward

Vowles stressed at the time that Williams’ chassis shortage had come following a winter of significant change throughout the team, including a move away from what he described as a “useless” and “joke” Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to manage car parts.

He repeated the short-term pain for long-term gain message in a mid-season update with the media at the Belgian Grand Prix, with the former Mercedes man not afraid about sacrificing opportunities in 2024 and 2025 to keep building for the future and the 2026 rules reset.

READ MORE: Albon pins hopes on upgrades for second half of season with Williams ‘digging deep’ to improve

That said, there is still a desire to improve their current position over the second half of the season, with Albon pointing to a few developments coming up which could put Williams on the right side of what has been a tight midfield battle until now.

“We haven’t had many, if any, upgrades this season so far, so we’ve been on the back foot,” said Albon at Spa. “We’re pushing hard at the factory, everyone’s working really hard… If we can get our first proper upgrade on the car when we come back, I think we can fight for points a bit more regularly.”