Why the FW48 upgrade package in Baku is so crucial for Williams

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix will be a huge weekend for the Williams team as they finally introduce the long-awaited major upgrade package for the FW48.

Up until now the 2026 season has been a painful one for drivers Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon, especially in the light of the promise shown last year.

Delays forced the team to miss the Barcelona Shakedown, and when it finally took to the track the car proved to be significantly overweight, as well as having some inherent issues.

At an early stage, much like Aston Martin, the team took the decision to focus on a major package for the second half of the season, although in the case of Williams some new bits have been introduced along the way, such as a revised front wing for Silverstone. There has also been an ongoing programme of trimming weight.

However, the results tell their own story. In the early races the drivers managed to log five points finishes, with a best of P8 for Albon in the high attrition Monaco Grand Prix. However, since then the team have failed to score a single point, with the cars typically finishing in the P15, P16 and P17 range.

In part that’s down to an improved reliability record across the field since the early races, but it also reflects the fact that rivals have been improving while Williams have made little progress.

“I think what's been interesting this year is most of the midfield teams, they always bring one or two upgrades a year,” Albon noted after a difficult race in Madrid last weekend. “That's kind of how it's gone. This year, even the midfield teams are bringing three or four upgrades a year, and the size of upgrades are huge as well.

“So if you think of us in a normal year, Baku would have put us back in contention. But we have to be honest with ourselves, the speed of the development race this year is huge – and yeah, we've fallen back.”

In other words, when the Baku package was signed off several months ago the numbers looked promising in terms of the potential gains. However, as other midfield cars have improved, the goalposts have moved.

The FW48 will be faster, there’s little doubt – but it’s all relative, and there might not be the dramatic surge up the grid that may have originally seemed possible.

It is also likely to be the last roll of the dice for Williams in 2026, as the focus turns increasingly to next season and the FW50.

“We're finishing realistically 50 seconds behind the midfield at the minute in a race,” said Albon. “So we're losing a second a lap, more or less, in the race, and this has to be a pretty big upgrade to do it. Let's see.

“We know it's going to be a good step. Is it going to be the full step? I'm hopeful for it, but I don't think it will be. Unfortunately, we said it last year, but the focus is on next year as well. And we realise we're too far back at the moment to have a couple of upgrades for this year. We need to focus on next year.”

Last year Sainz qualified second and finished third in Azerbaijan, a reminder of just how competitive Williams were at some venues. Like Albon, the Spaniard is keeping his expectations in check.

“I think that upgrade is going to definitely help us to get ourselves closer to potentially fighting for some points,” he said at his home race. “But realistically speaking, that’s nowhere near where we wanted to be this year, nowhere near what we promised. So, it’s still not enough, and it’s still not where we want to be.

“It’s an upgrade that will help a bit the motivation of the team and just to look into the weekend with something to look forward to, maybe to potentially get a point or two when we were like we were at the beginning of the year.

“But it’s nowhere near where we want to be, and I think our biggest hope is putting all the eggs in next year’s basket.”

Sainz makes a good point about motivation. The Baku package might not allow the team to move into contention for Q3, but the important thing is that it brings the performance gains that were calculated months ago.

That would be a demonstration that the processes are working, and will also give the design team the confidence that they are going in the right direction with the FW50.

Baku is thus crucial for Team Principal James Vowles, the man tasked with taking Williams back to title contention, and who a few weeks ago convinced Albon and Sainz to commit for the future.

Vowles highlighted changes in processes and methodology and a wave of key recruits (such as Chief Optimisation and Planning Officer Piers Thynne) as reasons for the drivers to have faith that the team won’t make the same mistakes that they made ahead of 2026.

“You're making a thousand decisions in the winter,” Vowles noted at Zandvoort. “You don't need many of them to be wrong before you start putting yourself into the wrong path. And that'll be the difference between a few tenths, but a few tenths these days is the between winning a championship or not.

“You go to the level of what are the big building blocks you're putting in place? Which is a combination of people, which is different to what we had before. A combination of strength in the team that was different to what we had before.

“And for us, we had a lack last year at the beginning of '25 of simulation technology. That actually only came online in November last year. The car was already pretty much done by that point in time.

“So what we were doing was using educated guessing, and we got some of it wrong. If you look at our rear ride height, we developed at the wrong rear ride height, as did Aston, for that matter, and corrected it.

“That doesn't seem like a huge amount. But you're aerodynamically developing in completely the wrong space, and it's not driven by anything more than simulation telling you that's a good direction for whatever characteristic you're after, and it goes wrong.

“That error can still be made across any winter, because you're in a theoretical space against a maximal space.”

If it does what it’s supposed to do, the Baku package will be a sign that things are moving in the right direction at Grove.

However, Vowles makes no guarantees that there won’t be some missteps with the development of the 2027 car: “Not for a second am I going to promise anyone, because there's no championship team that would.

“What you're more trying to do is show that there's enough depth that didn't exist previously in the ways of working systems, tools, processes, and people that allow you to catch as many of those as possible.”