The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

Engine:

Great news! we have the Mercedes engine and that’s a really good one. When Mercedes has it, it’s the best. When the customer teams have it, it’s less good. This is because the engine is a complex hybrid and figuring out when to charge the battery and when to deploy battery power each lap is left up to each team. Mercedes basically gave their customer teams a science fiction episode of a problem, a piece of super advanced technology that our intrepid heroes have to reverse engineer. I do actually believe JV when he says Mercedes are helpful, but I think that’s more like tech support help than track by track optimisation help.

Bad news! The Mercedes engine has more reliability issues than the Ferrari PU, but less than the Audi so it can always be worse. Carlos’ last DNF in Austria is apparently an entirely new battery issue that Mercedes hasn’t seen yet so we’re also doing new things to that engine. The positive is that there are four teams feeding this information back and Mercedes is mandated to give all of the customer teams the same fixes they get, so whenever McLaren or Mercedes has an issue that information goes towards future proofing the Williams as well which should help in the long-term

more bad news, the Mercedes PU seems to also struggle with overheating issues when it is following. Mercedes has historically had issues with that, and they mostly get around that by qualifying on pole. That’s not an option for the Williams, so we’re also having to do more temperature management which limits performance over a weekend as the drivers have to turn the engine down during the race periodically to get temps back in line

So we’ve got a very good engine, but we don’t know how to use it and we’re using it in its weakest way.

The Williams is surprisingly strong on the starts. Once the FIA implemented the extra delay for the teams that decided to ignore the rules and built engines that couldn’t spin up their turbo in time, Williams has done great. Williams cars might have better starts than Mercedes and Red Bull in terms of getting away quickly, unfortunately they are starting in P14 if they’re lucky and over the race they cannot maintain the position. Ferrari problems in a Mercedes PU pelt.

Chassis:

We’re still overweight. It’s my understanding that we’re targeting Baku (literally as I was typing this it shifted to a later date, this used to say Madrid. lol. lmao even) for a bigger chassis upgrade that should correct that. That’ll make us the last team to shed the weight as Red Bull got themselves under control in Austria and AM is targeting Spa

Aside from the weight there is a fundamental balance issue in the car. Both drivers have reported that there are issues with corners where one of the wheels lifts off. That’s a huge problem because it means uneven tire wear at the last and then also handling problems. Remember that F1 cars go fast because they push into the ground with so much force, so lifting a wheel is a crazy loss of downforce. That doesn’t mean that the wheel is visibly off the ground, but that all 4 aren’t pressing down. With the issue the car handles unpredictably, which means the drivers can’t take it to the limit

We’ve also got ?? aero issues idk what exactly but the type of testing they’re doing with Alex every week seems targeted at that. Potentially related to this wheel issue but like who knows what else

Special Williams problems:

There’s a few things that are stopping us from instantly fixing the car and all of them are the cost cap. They can’t switch out parts because they need old parts to wear out first cause otherwise we’ll run out of car parts before the end of the year. Flip side is that crashing is also extra painful for us because we can’t afford to print lots of parts, and some races have more attrition anticipated than others. For example, Singapore and Monaco are high attrition races so the team has to plan ahead to make sure they have extra parts for those races, which also impacts the timing of upgrades. At Silverstone, after lap 1 they had to revert Alex’s front wing to an earlier wing because they didn’t have a spare of the new one.

That’s not even the biggest problem. Williams have to use a chunk of their budget to invest in outdated team architecture. This is a cost that is higher for Williams than for other teams. I don't know the strict percentages, but if you imagine a pie with 3 slices, one slice for new car, one slice for overhead, and a third slice for future growth, the Williams third slice is a larger share than it is for most teams. Cadillac actually gets some respite on this as a new team, but Williams doesn't since it's not new. Like, we know McLaren is set up to win races and championships, we know Mercedes is; so they can put their budget towards maintaining what they have and developing and building the car. Williams has outdated processes and tools, they have old buildings that need renovations, so in addition to the maintenance money they also need backfill money and they have to split those priorities with developing the car. This is also why cost cap violations for things that ‘aren’t the car’ are still violations, because Williams needs that money!!!!!!

If we contrast ourselves to Haas, in some ways we’re in a worse place. Haas is the only team that spends under the cost cap, it’s significantly the smallest team and they all work out of a basement (barely an exaggeration apparently they didn’t use to have windows). But they don’t have to maintain much of anything. Everything they are doing is vendor based and that has its pros and cons, but the pro is that they can just pay for exactly what they need. Williams has to pay for stuff that isn’t working as well as for things that are and detangling which is which is a hard process, and again, the budget. It’s hard to attract and retain talent when that’s the case. Like, you can see how much people are wishing the drivers would go somewhere else, that’s also true for any given mid-level engineer. They’re not just competing in F1 as well, F1 used to pay well and now with the cost cap pays significantly less than other fields. Why suffer in the dysfunctional Williams transitional nightmare when they could go work on satellites elsewhere? It's a vicious cycle and JV has to go off and personally seduce new staff over.

Lest this sound too anti-cost cap I think without it Williams would not exist at all anymore… or there’s even odds that it would. So it just sucks basically that Williams was already in a bad place when it came in, it’s a tech debt and personnel debt that is still being paid.

What does that mean for the races?

Hopefully we should be able to challenge into Q2 for the rest of the year (factors that go into this include an assumption that Haas is going to plateau and Williams is going to improve. Prove me wrong Williams)

Until they can sort out the balance and weight issues, we won’t be able to hold those positions and will continue to slide down to hang out with our buddies in Cadillac and Aston Martin and that assumes AM doesn’t get better