James Vowles explains why Williams cannot immediately fix FW48 weight issue

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The engineering work is done and the parts exist, at least on paper. Williams team principal James Vowles has confirmed that the solutions for addressing his car's weight problem are in hand, but Formula 1's cost cap makes deploying these upgrades all at once financially impossible.

Speaking on The Vowles Verdict on YouTube, the Grove chief offered a detailed explanation of why fans of the team should expect a gradual fix instead of a plethora of upgrades in one race.

"In the press conference I spoke about the engineering work required to reduce all the weight is complete, which is the case as it is now. So really great work by our design team and the engineering work that we needed to do to effectively bring this car to not just the weight limit but actually significantly below the weight limit is done," Vowles said.

The problem is converting these concepts into physical components under the constraints of the championship's cost cap.

The FW48 is understood to have started the season much heavier than the team would have wanted due to the car failing crash tests ahead of testing. While this excess fat was trimmed for the Miami Grand Prix, there's still a long way to go before real change can be seen.

"Now the importance of that is the next stage, we have to be able to produce those parts," the former Mercedes strategist continued. "And what I indicated is one of the limitations of the cost cap. And again, the cost cap is a very good thing but the limitation is I simply can't produce all of those bits overnight.

"We could, but it would have cost us a tremendous amount. And what I indicated is that is one of the limitations."

The issue isn't the manufacturing capability of the team, it's instead wastage.

Vowles continued to explain that several components for the car - suspension legs, axles, uprights, wheels - were created in bulk before the season start to ensure that there's enough to "carry ourselves through".

"There are items that have quite high mileage limits. Now they don't last to the end of the year and what we want to make sure we do is produce new sets of those that have weight taken out of them. Same applies - by the way - to wheels for example.