Self-fulfilling Injury In Williams's 2024 F1

Alex Albon has disclosed that one of Williams’s time-saving but weight-adding techniques in its 2024 F1 vehicle production process actually meant it suffered greater car damage during its early-year accidents

The British team’s 2024 season was hampered by collisions from start to finish, with their FW46 vehicle also starting the year beyond the weight restriction of 798kg to the degree it was losing 0.45 seconds a lap, before it was lowered via its development plan.

In part, this was owing to the earliest iterations of some chassis components – such as suspension sections – being manufactured from metal instead of lighter carbon-fibre.

This was considered essential because Williams overhauled its vehicle construction method for the year just gone, which meant parts came significantly later, as it attempted to update its production system.

Metal parts are quicker to fabricate than those in carbon, with Williams also striving to make their car lighter overall anyhow.

It managed to drop 14kg from its overall chassis weight compared to 2023, while still being over the limit.

But the extra weight of metal elements meant more force traveling through a monocoque in an accident, such as when Williams was forced to sideline Logan Sargeant after Albon crashed in Australian Grand Prix practice, his chassis was too damaged to be used again and the team did not have a replacement at the time.

Albon revealed the scenario when asked if there was any special explanation for the many collisions he, Franco Colapinto and Sargeant experienced in the season just gone.

“There's a mix,” Albon told Motorsport.com in an exclusive interview. “There's a mix of driver errors, there's a mix of issues.

“I wouldn’t call them issues around the car but, for example, like Brazil where Albon crashed in the wet Q3, there are things where in a technical point of view, it's kind of a driver problem, but it's not really.

“It's just systems that were… we altered and parts where they were simply kind of really challenging.

“Together, we could have done a better job and I think we would have been able to avoid it. So, there's a bit of that going on.

“There's also just, even if you take the start of the year, for example, we went through quite a few tubs. I guess Melbourne was one. Suzuka was one.

“But, actually, if you look at it, part of the problem is within the weight issue itself.

“We had some pieces on the car that were metallic rather than carbon. So, they actually were generating some of the broken tubs.

“So, it was almost like a self-fulfilling injury that we had. So, there's stuff like that, which from race one meant we were on the back foot.”

Read Also: Bagnaia Compares 2024 MotoGp Title Loss With Marquez

When Motorsport.com took Albon’s claim to Williams’s head engineer Dave Robson, he replied: “Yes, that is true to some extent.

“Not sure whether that cause and effect statement is exactly right, but we definitely had some metallic components on the car that are now all carbon and should have been carbon from the outset.

“And that definitely does change the load that goes through the chassis, so these are the front suspension parts.

“The reason for doing that is you can design say a metallic trackrod much more quickly and machine them much more quickly than you can make carbon components.

“So, once you get behind, that's a way of recovering some of the time. You suffer a tiny mass penalty for the component itself if it's something like a trackrod.

“They were on the car for a while and then we soon updated those and definitely if you do that for some of the front suspension components and then you suffer a heavy impact, loads of the chassis are a bit different so yeah it probably did contribute to some of the initial issues.”