Vowles gives ruling on (spare) chassis for Japanese Grand Prix

Alexander Albon's chassis seems likely to be ready in time for the Japanese Grand Prix. However, Williams also have bad news. Indeed, according to James Vowles, the team will once again travel to a race weekend without a spare chassis.

Williams were in a mess after FP1 in Australia. After a crash by Albon in the first free practice, it soon became clear that the team had no spare chassis available. Albon, despite crashing, was left with the only chassis available. Logan Sargeant bore the brunt and was unable to compete for the rest of the weekend.

The chassis that Albon damaged is now being repaired by Williams and should be ready in time for the Japan GP. "I'm confident we'll be able to fix the chassis. We put measures in place to make sure the chassis was back here very early on Monday morning. I think it arrived around 2am or so. Since then there was already crews inside the building working on that, stripping it down and doing repairs," Vowles stated in a video from the team.

Some work still needs to be done, but the Williams team boss assumes that two cars can be raced in Japan. Even then, drivers will have to be careful, as once again, the team will not have a spare chassis at its disposal.

Why Williams did not have a spare chassis

"We won't have a spare chassis in Japan. The original plan before the season started was to have three chassis as you would expect at round one [Bahrain]. That gently slipped towards round three [Australia] as items became more and more delayed. And since then, especially with the work that we're doing now on chassis number two, there is again going to be a small amount of delay."

"We will have a chassis soon. In terms of how much work it is, as you can probably gather by the fact of it's not available to us now, it is weeks and weeks of work. It is thousands of hours. It's one of the biggest jobs within an F1 team. You've got to get it right. Even when it's built, it then has to have a number of items completed to it to get it in exactly the right state so it's ready for racing."

So the message is clear for Albon and Sargeant: there must be no crashes in Japan. A crash involving chassis damage would prevent one of the two, probably Sargeant, from racing again. Suzuka is normally difficult enough for drivers, let alone with this in mind.