James Vowles insists ‘mood has lifted’ at Williams in Bahrain after missing Barcelona Shakedown

James Vowles feels that the “mood has lifted” at Williams as the team hit the track for official pre-season testing in Bahrain, having missed the Barcelona Shakedown just two weeks earlier.

While the rest of the field put their cars through their initial paces at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Williams announced just prior to the event that they would not take part due to “delays in the FW48 programme” as they continued to “push for maximum car performance”.

However, the squad later confirmed that they would be ready to join the first pre-season test in Bahrain, while the car took to the track for the first time during a shakedown at Silverstone on February 4.

Having joined testing in Sakhir as planned – with both Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon running during the opening day – Vowles was quizzed on whether the mood had improved considering the previous challenges.

“Yeah, definitely,” the Team Principal responded. “It was a tough winter, there’s no doubt about it. But what’s great is if we took yesterday, for example, the car ran faultlessly just from start to finish, and actually no major vices which is what we’re hoping for here, good correlation, so absolutely, to your point, the mood has lifted.

“I would say we still have a huge amount to do before Melbourne. The facts are, we did miss three days of testing in Barcelona – the good news is the weather’s good here! But we did miss that and, whilst we had other plans, we just need to make sure now that we forge a good, sensible plan across these six days to catch back up.”

Pushed on whether the team will feel caught up should the remainder of Bahrain testing go to plan – and that they won’t arrive at the first race in Australia on the back foot – Vowles answered: “Short answer, yes.

“There is something that’s good about being in fairly constant conditions, which is Bahrain. Obviously the track goes very warm and very cold, but we want to experience that anyway. But without wet weather and good baselines, we’re able to move the car on very quickly, so I’m very confident of that.”

Reflecting on what the squad have learned so far about the new car from its limited running, Vowles spoke positively about the correlation coming from the FW48 so far.

“We have to point out, it’s still a filming day, so we really did have camera cars on track and all sorts like that, and it’s promotional tyres which are not that close to race tyres anymore,” the team boss explained of Williams’ previous shakedown.

“However, the main things are this: what you can see is, for example, in all of your pressure tappings and aero data, is there anything that looks odd? And the answer to that is no, fundamentally.

“Is there anything that’s odd in the vehicle dynamics? Anything that just stands out as something you’re not expecting? And the answer to that was no as well.

“It will evolve as we go through, but what you’re looking for is that correlation to all of your simulation environments, and that looked good.”