Williams scrambling to recover after devastating F1 crash run
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Williams has been left reeling after a crash-laden two-week run in Mexico and in Brazil that has decimated the team's reserve of spare part, leaving it in a race against time to rebuild and prepare its cars for the upcoming Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Both Alex Albon and Franco Colapinto were involved in multiple crashes throughout Formula 1's last two race weekends.
Albon's significant incidents included a heavy crash in FP1 in Mexico and a race-ending collision with Yuki Tsunoda on the opening lap of the race at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.
In Sao Paulo last weekend, the Anglo-Thai racer suffered a major accident in Sunday morning's wet qualifying that ruled him out of the race due to irreparable damage.
Williams rookie Franco Colapinto also had a crash-filled weekend in Brazil, with a significant qualifying incident followed by a red-flag-triggering accident in the wet race.
The succession of incidents has inevitably pushed the Grove-based outfit's resources to the brink.
Williams team boss James Vowles acknowledged the sheer toll this recent string of accidents has taken on the team's reserves, calling the situation "unsustainable".
"There's no team on the grid that can cope with five major accidents in two race weekends," Vowles explained in his post-race debrief.
"Simply, the matter of spares we carry are not sufficient to carry that amount of attrition."
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Vowles' task has now shifted to ensuring the team can bring both of its cars to Las Vegas with enough replacement parts in reserve while also running them within the optimal specification.
"Vegas, I have high hopes for," he added. "We were fast there last year, and I'm confident the car will work well in those conditions.
"So we will do our absolute utmost to get two cars to the best specification they can be, with sufficient spares around us to make that happen.
"What that looks like is difficult to predict. We're still getting the items back from Brazil and determining what we have to do in terms of construct and build in order to give ourselves the best possible scenario."
Beyond the logistical pain of damage control, last weekend's events in Brazil also delivered a psychological blow to the team.
Albon's Q3 crash, which occurred just as the car was showing promising pace in the wet, was particularly hard to take. Adding salt to the wound, Williams' hard-earned position in the Constructors' Championship slipped, as Alpine took a double podium finish in Brazil.
For Vowles, the recent setbacks hit close to home.
"The Brazil weekend was probably the most brutal that I can remember across my entire career," said the Briton. "In the space of seven days, a little more than, we had five major accidents. In Brazil alone between qualifying the race three.
"That's an amount that near enough no one can sustain on the grid."
Despite the pain, Vowles remains committed to his vision for Williams' long-term goals. The journey toward turning the British outfit into a race-winning team once again is still very much on his mind, even as the team copes with the immediate challenges.
"This team is going through the process of rebuilding itself into a state where it can win races in the future. That doesn't happen overnight.
"It doesn't happen without significant change throughout an organization, and this one race is simply just a blip in what is a grand scheme of a multi-year programme."
Even so, Vowles was candid about the emotional toll.
"It doesn't mean it hurts any less. It's something that hurts tremendously as I'm talking to you now," he continued.
"But I want us to be successful and performant. I came here not to be fighting for the odd point, but rather fighting for wins and more in the future. And that can't be achieved without some level of compromise along the way, without rebuilding an organisation.
"So yes, it's painful what happened last weekend, but it hasn't changed what our destination is. In fact, it's rooted me even further more to the fact of what we have to do to achieve it is significant, but we can achieve it together as a team."
As the clock ticks toward Las Vegas, Vowles and his team face a race against time to rebuild and restock, driven by both the challenges of the recent past and the promise of the future.
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