James Vowles has revealed that Williams could have made it to the first pre-season test of the season at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, but that doing so would have compromised the team’s availability of spare parts through the first weekends of the 2026 campaign.

Williams have been targeting the new regulations in 2026 since late in the 2024 campaign, with team principal Vowles viewing the technical shift as the Grove-based team’s ticket back to the sharp end of the grid.

However, due to the excessive strain of Williams’ aggressive development programme, Vowles opted to make a bold strategic call, skipping the first of three pre-season tests. The other 10 organisations were afforded three sessions, spread across five days, with the deployment up to the individual squad’s choosing.

Speaking to select media, including Express Sport, about the decision to miss Barcelona, Vowles explained: “In terms of Barcelona, we could have made Barcelona testing. Simple as that. We could have made it.

“But in doing so, I would have had to turn upside down the impact on spares, components and updates across Bahrain, Melbourne and beyond. And the evaluation of it was that, for running in a cold, damp Barcelona, against doing a VTT test and against the spare situation – and frankly, there are zero points for running in a shakedown test – we made the decision, and I stand by it, that the right thing to do is to make sure that we are turning up at Bahrain correctly prepared, and prepared in Melbourne as well.”

Vowles also moved to dispel the rumour that the car is significantly overweight. “There is no knowledge of the weight until we get to Bahrain, in terms of understanding where it is. That’s not avoiding the question, but you need to get all the sensor packs off to understand where we are.”

He added: “There’s not a single person that would truly know it. It’s impossible to know it, because you need the car together without sensors in the right form, and that doesn’t exist today.

While their F1 rivals have been laying down hundreds of laps in Montmelo, Williams have been back at base working on a virtual testing programme. Vowles confirmed that drivers Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz have been plying their trade in the simulator, working out the intricacies of the new regulations.