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The 2023 Formula One season began with fireworks.
Aston Martin leapfrogged the field early on in the season, going from finishing seventh in the 2022 constructor standings to Fernando Alonso securing a podium finish and Lance Stroll bringing home sixth in Bahrain. But another team flew under the radar as it showed early signs of major gains: Williams.
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“Everyone’s, I’m sure, looking at Aston Martin right now on the podium, thinking what steps they’ve done, but we’re second,” Alex Albon said in Bahrain. “(When) you look at us from last year to this year in this position, 12 months on, I have to say we’ve done an amazing job.”
The Grove-based crew — which went from winning world championships (nine constructors’ and seven drivers’ titles, the last being in the late 1990s) to scoring no points in 2020 and often being a backmarker in recent years — ended the 2022 campaign in last place and far behind the rest of the grid points-wise. But Williams underwent plenty of changes during the offseason, including a driver change with rookie Logan Sargeant and a new team principal in James Vowles joining just days before 2023 preseason testing began. It started off the 2023 season on the right foot with Albon scoring points early with a P10 finish and Sargeant not far behind in 12th.
Williams’ straight-line speed stood out and set up early expectations that it would be competitive at those types of circuits. But the team didn’t score points again until Canada in June, once again thanks to Albon. It marked his first of two seventh-place finishes in 2023.
By the end of the season, Albon had scored 27 of Williams’ 28 points, extracting the absolute maximum and then some from the FW45, helping it secure seventh place in the constructors’ championship. At times, the 27-year-old’s performance left his own team members surprised — but there is room for improvement.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved at the team,” Albon said in Abu Dhabi. “I think about the races that we’ve scored points in, and we haven’t had really a smooth race where we’ve just gone, ‘Well, that was nice.’ I wish we had more of them. But unfortunately a lot of them are holding up a bunch of cars behind us, which is what we become renowned for. The car’s improved a lot from last year. We go into every weekend feeling like there’s a chance to score points, but even in that case, our race pace is not always that great.
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“When there’s been a chance, we’ve done it, and I think that’s been the main difference against our rivals.”
A tale of two drivers
Entering 2023, Williams had two very different drivers on its hands.
Albon, who joined the F1 grid in 2019 as part of the Red Bull system, sat on the sidelines for a season before joining Williams in 2022 and became the leader heading into last season. Meanwhile, Sargeant went from F3 to F2 to F1 in just two years and had little testing mileage. As Vowles later said in Qatar, “We have — and I’ve said this publicly — a responsibility to invest in our rookie drivers. We’ve put him there, and we’ve given him nearly no testing mileage. I’m used to 30,000km (18641 miles), not 850km (528 miles).”
The pair started strongly and relatively cleanly despite going scoreless in the early races. Albon noted Melbourne — where he spun and crashed out — as “the only race where I felt like I missed an opportunity to score points.”
But their paths soon diverged. As Albon found his groove in the FW45, Sargeant started slipping and endured a fairly costly stretch of mistakes after summer break. In each of the first four race weekends back, the rookie either crashed or collided with someone.
On Saturday during the Japanese GP weekend, Vowles said to Sky Sports F1 that Sargeant’s car has “an old aerodynamic package in a number of ways” solely “because parts are becoming more and more difficult to come by.”
“We’ve had more attrition than was expected, it’s fair to say,” Vowles added to Sky that weekend. “We have enough to deal with this accident today. But it will mean we’ll have to divert attention away from other items while producing more spare parts before we get to the end of the year.”
October’s U.S. Grand Prix marked a turning point. The rookie was promoted to P10 after the disqualifications of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, earning him his first F1 point, arguably helping his case to stay in F1 for another season. More than the fact of the point, Sargeant was competitive against Albon, a critical benchmark when comparing drivers, and it was a step forward at the right time. Austin remained the only point-finish for Sargeant, while Albon brought two more points home a week later in Mexico City (a race where the rookie retired due to a fuel pump issue).
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It became clear fairly quickly that Albon would be a force to reckon with in Mexico. He was just 0.095 seconds off of Max Verstappen’s lap time in FP1, and Williams’ head of vehicle performance Dave Robson said during a press conference shortly after that Albon’s pace was “quite a big surprise, if I’m honest. We still don’t fully understand why. I think it’s quite clear that Alex was very confident and happy in the car, right from the first lap, which makes a big difference.”
By season’s end, Williams had reached Q3 nine times, recorded nine points finishes and 11 DNFs en route to its best season since 2017. Albon and Sargeant will carry on as Williams’ F1 drivers in 2024. But during his sophomore season, the American driver needs to find consistency like he displayed in the closing races of 2023. As for Albon, the confidence he’s gained is key, particularly for a team that’s looking to continue to rebound.
“Rather than a big step, I think almost every weekend you see (a) growing amount of confidence in Alex to lead the team. I think he’s become increasingly confident in his own views and opinions of where the weaknesses are in the car,” Robson said in Mexico City. “He then feeds that into us, obviously. He’s then straight back into the simulator back at Grove, working on the solution. So, I think that whole loop is just increasing his confidence. He knows that what he’s saying is right. We can see where the solutions potentially are in the simulator. And now it’s up to us as the engineering team to work out how we deliver them.”
The task: ‘Rebuild an old British icon’
Looking back over the season, it is impressive that Williams got a car on track that was as competitive as it was.
Though Vowles didn’t join until right before preseason testing, he noticed a “spark” within those first few weeks. He said ahead of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, “There are shoulders lifted, there’s heads held high now, there is really direction that they can see where we’re going and how we’re moving forward. It’s a team clearly that have had a tremendously difficult winter and (a) difficult few years even prior to that. But they can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel and direction we’re going in.”
Williams’ infrastructure is out of date, and the cost cap limits capital expenditures. It’ll take time and long-term investment (both monetarily and personnel-wise) to help the team bounce back to its once competitive form. It is why maintaining seventh place as the season wound down was so critical. Private investment firm Dorilton Capital owns the team, but finishing higher in the constructor standings results in multimillion-dollar gains.
“We’re racers. Everyone’s a racer in the team. We all care about what position we finish. That walk into the pit lane is a little bit too long at the minute,” Albon said in Abu Dhabi. (A team’s position in the pits is often determined based on the previous season’s championship order.) “But it will help the team. It will speed up the development of the team as well. At the minute, Dorilton do put the cash in, and it would benefit everyone if they had to put it in a bit less.”
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The Grove-based team had long since stopped car development by the final races of the season and focused on years ahead, the long-term project. Albon described the car as having “a big personality in some ways.”
“It has one way that you need to drive it,” he continued. “And at the same time, there are corners that suit it, corners that don’t suit it.”
Albon cited Brazil and Monza as two examples. Autódromo José Carlos Pace has a few corners where they couldn’t stop front-locking the FW45’s tires, but at Autodromo Nazionale Monza, there wasn’t a limitation for them, per se. “Our job next year is to get rid of (the peaks) as much as we can. That’s been in the car for the last five, six years.”
To help make that happen, Williams now has a chief technical officer in Pat Fry, who left Alpine and started with the Grove-based team on Nov. 1, after technical director FX Demaison stepped down a year ago. “The thing that excites me about this opportunity is the board is fully on board with what it’s going to take to move this place forward,” Fry said. “They’re willing to invest what it takes and support us in building a team. And it’s a nice thing, isn’t it? To rebuild an old British icon.”
Vowles and Fry are aligned in how to build and grow Williams, Fry said, and they’re “trying to create that environment where people feel empowered to make brave decisions.” Mistakes will happen. It’s part of the process of becoming successful. How people respond to those mistakes can prove out whether it is a cohesive team.
Williams is a bigger picture project. In addition to building a car, the team is tasked with improving its tools, infrastructure and methodologies. But 2023 built the foundation.
“It is a team that’s moving forward, to be honest, and there’s no point hiding behind the fact we’ve got a mountain of work to do and things to develop. But I think people will see that there’s a commitment there,” Fry said. “The ultimate goal in the end is to be for championship competitor. In two, three, four years time, we need to be getting in the fight, breaking into the top three.
“It’s a tough ask to do when your buildings (are) where we are, but I think it’s all possible.”
(Lead photo of Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant at the 2023 U.S. Grand Prix: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)