by VALERIO BARRETTA
Williams, Vowles comments on Albon’s suspension
Saturday at Zandvoort was perhaps Williams’ darkest day in the entire 2024 World Championship. In the morning, Logan Sargeant destroyed his car in FP3 and was denied access to qualifying despite all the efforts of his mechanics. In the afternoon, Alexander Albon achieved his best qualifying result of the season (eighth place) but with an irregular car.
Vowles’ words
The Williams’ floor was judged too wide and therefore not compliant with the regulations: a blow in terms of results and morale that team principal James Vows he explained it like this on social media.
“The performance of the car has been positive. We are in a situation where the update is producing good results and, in a very tight pack, we were able to get the car back into Q3 and into a position to score points in today’s race. This is also reflected in the long run on Friday, which was again positive. The car stood out in the ‘midfield’ and at times the long run was overlapping with the Ferrari, which was a very different situation to what we found ourselves in at the start of the season. As positive as that is, the fact is that we were disqualified for a floor that was too wide and my job here today is to look at what happened and what we are doing to address the situation immediately. The floor that we have here this weekend, in fact the whole bodywork and a number of elements are all new. It’s not the first time we’ve been scanned. We have obviously followed and respected all these procedures since they were introduced several years ago and we have never been found in excess until now. We now use scanning techniques rather than physical measurement techniques, because it is not a single point to be taken into account, but rather the heights and widths of quite complex shapes. Before coming here, we scanned the floor and the car several times.. It happened at the factory, it also happened here on Thursday and we demonstrated to the FIA all these results which indicated that our fund was compliant with the rules, but what matters is the Federation’s judgmentwith its measurements and systems, which we fully accept“.
“Now we need to understand how we could have gotten our measurements wrong and what we need to change in terms of the process with immediate effect. There is only one area of the car that we did not respect and that It is easily solvablebut in any case the rule is the rule and in this sense it is black or white. We can’t spend man hours developing an update package and ask our drivers to give it their all to secure a top-10 finish and then throw it all away not respecting all the limits of the regulation“.
“No one is responsible for this but ourselves.it is a responsibility that falls on our shoulders. No one else, apart from us, has any responsibility. We have to address and resolve this issue with immediate effect. This race weekend we still have a car that is strong enough to be able to fight with the opponents. I am excited about the outlook today, because the car remains fast and we have the opportunity to race: on top of this, there are nine more races where we always have to deal with perfection to score points and fight for the championship.
This is not the standard I want us to hold ourselves to this weekend, but let’s now try to change the process to make sure it doesn’t happen again.“.
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