Nico Rosberg claims Williams’ ambition with the FW48 got the better of the team, resulting in an overweight car that the team is still trying to recover from
Williams entered the F1 2026 season with high hopes after claiming fifth in the Constructors’ standings, its best result in almost a decade, in 2025.
Nico Rosberg on Williams’ F1 2026 struggles
The team, though, has struggled since the beginning as it sat out the early pre-season shakedown outing before arriving at the first official test in Bahrain with an overweight car.
Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz have scored just 11 points in 14 rounds, with the team sitting ninth in the championship.
While the team focused on reducing the car’s weight in the opening rounds, it has since introduced a few minor performance parts.
The big update will arrive at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
But while team principal James Vowles previously said it would be “almost an entirely new car”, he has since conceded that the updates “won’t put us to even the bare minimum of where I’d like to be, which is scoring points for a weekend”.
F1 2026: The season’s winners and losers
The results of the F1 2026 championship
The F1 2026 Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship standings
“That simply is not the reality of where we are today,” he added.
He does not believe the team will have an easy run to the chequered flag in the championship.
“It’s been a tough year, and it will continue to be a tough year to the end,” the Briton admitted.
“There’s just no two ways about it. A lot of the mistakes that we made across the winter period will stay with us all the way until the end of this year. And what we’re trying to do is put ourselves back above water by the time we get into next year’s car.”
Rosberg agrees that Williams’ F1 2026 season was undone even before the car hit the track.
The German, who made his F1 debut with Williams in 2006 and spent four years with the team before switching to Mercedes, believes Williams was overly ambitious with its FW48 and tripped itself up.
“Williams just messed up the winter,” the 2016 F1 world champion told Sky Sports’ F1 Show.
“They messed up the winter developing this new car. They tried to be very ambitious in the way they were building the chassis, tried to go new ways, really innovate.
“It ended up backfiring.
“They’ve got a lot too much weight on the car, and remember that 10kg of extra weight in this sport is three tenths of a second per lap, so, it’s enormous if you’re overweight. It’s just enormous lap time lost.”
The 41-year-old says it has meant Williams has spent the better part of this season trying to recover.
“So they’re fighting an uphill battle to try and recover from that because they do have the best engine,” he continued. “Remember, they have a Mercedes engine, so there’s no excuse there.
“I’m sure the aerodynamics must also not be in the best place. So, they still need to make a lot of progress there.
“Unfortunately, because they were in such a great place in recent years, they were really making progress, and we really thought they were moving towards the top six or top eight again permanently, and now they’ve dropped back massively, which is a bit of a shocker.
“It’s a tough moment also for James Vowles, who I rate so highly, but he’s really got to fight through this struggle now and turn things around and bring the team back towards a positive direction, which is not easy.”
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Originally published by Planet F1 —
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