Williams chassis broken, needs repair: 'Not a new one until May'

Drama for the Williams team. Alexander Albon's badly damaged chassis is sent back to the Grove factory to be repaired.

A collision with Daniel Ricciardo caused a big crash for Alexander Albon. The British-Thai driver ended up in the tyre pile-up and luckily got out of the car on his own. Only the right front of the car was really badly damaged. A tragedy for Williams, as it is the second big crash for the team in two race weekends.

The team do not yet have a spare chassis. They will not get one until the race in Miami. "In terms of the chassis, if you put all of your resources everything you possibly had within the organisation on it, it could be 8-10 weeks that you pretty much get a chassis done from freezer to something actually built and out there," James Vowles told Motorsport.com

Wrong schedule for Williams

The fact that the team is without a third chassis is annoying, and it wasn't quite the intention tells Vowles: "In our particular case clearly we have never had the intention of being here without three chassis, the intention was to have three right at the beginning of the year. It's an outcome from just an overload within the system, the complexity of this car, and the amount that we were trying to push through.In terms of the complexity of it, it’s enormous. The chassis is thousands and thousands of pieces that you're trying to bring together at the same time."

The incident was looked into after the Japanese Grand Prix, but the stewards decided that no further action was needed. The decision was made because it was a race incident on the first lap, had it happened later in the race a different decision might have been made.