Williams Focuses on Simulator Prep as FW48 Eyes Bahrain Vindication

Williams unveiled the visual identity for its FW48 while keeping the chassis covered after missing Barcelona pre-season running. The livery retains the team’s dark-blue base with lighter-blue sidepods and adds prominent white panels on the sidepods and on the front and rear wings for Komatsu branding. Barclays logos in cyan-blue appear following a new banking partnership, and the announcement confirmed additional commercial partners including Anthropic and Wilkinson Sword.

The team reconfirmed Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz as its drivers; Sainz scored two podiums in 2025, and the pair will look to build on Williams’ fifth-place finish in the 2025 constructors’ standings. Team principal James Vowles called the livery the most complex and best the team has produced and said Williams missed Barcelona because of production delays tied to an ambitious design and manufacturing programme, not failed FIA crash tests.

Williams described the FW48 as representing a technical shift — greater emphasis on overbody airflow and the introduction of active aero via movable front and rear wing elements — and confirmed the car runs a Mercedes power unit and gearbox. The team says it relied heavily on intensive virtual-track testing and simulator work at its Grove base to develop accurate car-and-power-unit models before on-track running; rivals have warned that this season’s higher electrical power and tighter energy-management demands make actual track mileage particularly valuable.

Williams plans a shakedown of the FW48 ahead of the Bahrain tests (Feb 11–13 and Feb 18–20), where it will run a fan-selected “flow state” livery across the two sessions and aim to recover lost on-track time. Vowles and the engineering group expressed cautious optimism, based on internal metrics, that the FW48 could be the team’s strongest package, but they acknowledged the car’s true competitiveness will only be revealed once it completes running in Bahrain and translates simulation gains into lap time under race conditions.