Photo by Kym Illman/Getty Images
For the second race in a row the team at Williams has some repair work to do ahead of qualifying
It was a difficult weekend for Williams in Melbourne.
For a brief moment Friday at Suzuka, it looked as if history would repeat itself in Japan.
Alexander Albon’s crash in FP1 at the Australian Grand Prix severely damaged the chassis on his FW46, to the extent that the team could not repair it in time for Saturday’s qualifying session. Without a backup chassis in Melbourne, Team Principal James Vowles was forced to make a difficult decision, sliding Albon into Logan Sargeant’s FW46, and sidelining the second-year driver for qualifying, and the race.
Williams was able to repair the damage to Albon’s car ahead of this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix, and both Albon and Sargeant took to the grid for Friday’s first practice session with the American driver in the now-repaired FW46 once driven by Albon. But late in the first session Sargeant veered off-line, and was quickly in the barrier himself:
The driver quickly reported that he was okay, but it was a true “heart-in-the-throat” moment for the team. Given the lack of a backup chassis, would Williams be down to just one car for the second-straight race?
Thankfully for the team, the chassis remained intact, and while Sargeant was sidelined for the rain-shortened FP2, it should be all systems go for Saturday.
“It is pretty significant,” said Vowles at the FIA Press Conference Friday before FP2. “So the chassis is OK, fortunately, but I would say pretty much everything else isn’t. So suspension all round, gearbox cracked, big damage.”
Vowles also addressed the team’s situation regarding a backup chassis, and when Williams might have one at the track.
“I think the third chassis at the moment won’t be with us until Miami, a long way away. In terms of the chassis, if you put all of your resource, everything you possibly had within the organisation on it, you could be eight, 10 weeks that you pretty much get a chassis done, from freezer to something actually built and out there,” said Vowles. “And that’s by the time you get to sort of the third chassis. It takes longer for the first ones as you get used to the process. Clearly we don’t have the whole organisation just working on that.
“In our particular case, clearly, we don’t and never had the intention of being here without three chassis. The intention was to have three right at the beginning of the year. It’s an outcome from just an overload within the system, the complexity of this car and the amount that we were trying to push through. But in terms of the complexity of it, it’s enormous. I mean, the chassis is thousands and thousands of pieces you’re trying to bring together at the same time,” added Vowles.
As the team arrived in Japan, there were questions regarding how Sargeant would respond to what he called the “hardest moment” of his career. That led to Vowles addressing the matter of whether his accident in FP1 was due to the young driver trying to prove something after being sidelined in Melbourne.
Vowles intimated that that was not the case.
“At the top of the brow of the hill there, he struggled to see where his positioning was on track. So it fundamentally looks like he didn’t quite realise where he was with where the grass was on the outside and put a wheel on the grass,” described Vowles.
“I’ve been chatting to him all week, all these last few weeks, in fact, because this is the point where you’ve got to keep a driver very close to you,” continued Vowles. “You’ve sort of given them a very difficult situation to deal with, through no fault of their own. But he was honestly in a very good state of mind this week and last night again when I called him at about 9, 10pm, really, really strong state of mind, just wanted to get back into the car and get going, but not with the intention of proving to the world he deserves a seat, just his normal approach to things.
“And what you saw here wasn’t a driver making a mistake because I think they were pushing to the limit. It’s a very different type of mistake, a frustrating one by all accounts, because it wasn’t on the limit of what the car could do,” added the Williams boss. “There was far more turning potential in there. He just didn’t know where the car was on track relative to where he expected it to be anyway. So I don’t think you’re seeing there the reaction of someone that wasn’t driving in Melbourne. I think you’re seeing more just a situation that could have appeared at any time.”
For his part, Sargeant described the accident as a “silly mistake.”
“I put the car in a place I didn’t realise I was at. It’s a bit of a silly mistake and one that I shouldn’t be making especially in FP1,” described Sargeant in the team’s post-practice report. “Fortunately, it wasn’t like the mistake last year when I over pushed. Nevertheless, I still left the team with some damage but got away better than it could’ve been.”
Sargeant will get his next crack at redemption Saturday in the third practice session, and qualifying.
