San Francisco Frontiers - Vowles dismisses Williams 2026 title hopes as 'not realistic'

The 46-year-old, who took over at Williams after 12 years as a strategy guru with Mercedes, said he was determined that the team should do at least as well as their fifth place in the constructors' standings in 2025, their joint-best finish in 10 years.

"Our expectation is 2025 set the baseline. P5 is where I want us to be at our base, and we nudge forward from there," Vowles told AFP.

"But it's exponentially harder, in my experience, being P4, and exponentially harder being P3, P2, P1.

"And I think with what you can see at the moment, the journey to P2, P1 is simply not on the cards for 2026. We have work to do.

"But do I expect that, as a baseline, we perform at least where we were last year? Yes."

Williams won the last of their nine constructors' titles in 1997 when Jacques Villeneuve also won the drivers' world championship.

For the last 20 years, apart from two seasons when Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas lifted them to third, they have struggled to make the top five.

This season they again have Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon at the wheel, with a Mercedes engine powering them, and Vowles is confident that the long-term planning is there to return to the glory days.

"Am I confident we as a business have made a step forward from 2025 to 2026 in the way we're working? Absolutely," he says.

"There's some elements of the car that are really quite impressive. Not all of it, but elements of it.

"Are we at championship level today? No. But I'm confident the way we are going about this will allow us to catch up in the time frame.

"I will always invest in our future. One of the great things about the cost cap is you are constrained.

"You can either think about today, next race, or you can think about a year down the line. It's the same money. You've got to spend it wisely in that regard.

"The decisions that we made in 2025 were the right ones to make sure we forward invest in this team.

"We moved a lot of our team onto this car. But what you don't do is print it early."

- 'Right decision' -

With only a month to go before the start of the new season in Australia on March 8, pressure is growing on every team to ensure that their new cars, massively overhauled to meet the new regulations, are in good working order.

Vowles, however, stands by his decision to skip the shakedown in Barcelona in order to tweak their revisions.

"One of the most difficult decisions I've made in my career is not going to Barcelona," he admitted.

"I'm confident it's the right decision though.

"We did VTT (virtual track testing) and other elements with the drivers that have positioned us in a good stead.

"It's not the same as going to Barcelona... But I'm confident that with six days of testing in Bahrain, we'll be absolutely fine coming to Melbourne.

"Ultimately, that's the line in the sand that's important. It's not whether you're at a shakedown test, it's where you perform in Melbourne."

H.King--SFF