Rosberg brands Williams 2026 campaign 'a shocker' as Vowles faces uphill recovery

Nico Rosberg has delivered a blunt verdict on Williams’s 2026 Formula 1 season, calling it “a shocker” and warning that team principal James Vowles faces a serious fight to drag the Grove outfit back into contention. The 2016 world champion pointed to a botched winter development programme as the root cause of the team’s struggles.

Williams arrived at pre-season testing in Bahrain already compromised, having missed private testing in Barcelona in January and carrying a car that was significantly overweight. Despite introducing major upgrades at the Miami Grand Prix, the team has found points hard to come by, sitting ninth in the constructors’ standings on 11 points — six from Carlos Sainz and five from Alex Albon.

Rosberg was unsparing in his diagnosis. “Williams just messed up the winter,” he said. “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, and 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 former Mercedes driver noted that Williams’s power unit situation offers no excuse for the team’s position. “They do have the best engine — they have a Mercedes engine, so there’s no excuse there,” he said. “I’m sure the aerodynamics must also not be in the best place. So, they still need to make a lot of progress there.”

What makes the regression particularly stark, Rosberg argued, is how much momentum Williams appeared to have built in recent seasons. “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.”

Despite the criticism, Rosberg was careful to separate his assessment of the team’s situation from his view of Vowles as a leader. “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.”

With the constructors’ championship already pulling away at the front, Williams’s focus will be on closing the weight deficit and extracting more from their aerodynamic package before the season reaches its midpoint.