Ralf Schumacher labels Williams ‘biggest flop’ as FW48 weight rumours continue

Former Williams drivers Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya have laid into Williams over its FW48’s weight issues, branding the car the “biggest flop” of F1 2026 and calling for those responsible to be sacked.

Williams’ start to the 2026 season didn’t go to plan with the team skipping the Barcelona pre-season shakedown, which led to speculation that the FW48 was significantly over the minimum weight limit of 768kg.

Ralf Schumacher calls Williams biggest flop over FW48 weight issues

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Williams put that to bed when the team published its technical specification, with the 2026 car coming in at 772.4kg, just 4.4kg over the minimum limit set by the regulations.

That, though, did little to quash the rumours, with the F1 Nations’ Tom Clarkson claiming: “One of the engineers told me that in weight alone, it’s about a second a lap, compared to people who are on the weight limit.”

Williams has struggled, not only with reliability but also pace, in the first two rounds of the championship.

Carlos Sainz lined up 16th, effectively P14 on the grid at the Chinese Grand Prix after Oscar Piastri and Gabriel Bortoleto were late non-starters, and scored the team’s first points in ninth place. But it was a race in which four cars didn’t start, and three retired.

Schumacher, who spent five years with Williams and won five grands prix with the team, is hoping Williams can capitalise on the upcoming gap between Japan and Miami to work on its weight issue, which he believes it as much as 30kg over the limit.

Because right now, says the German, the team is his flop of the season.

“This long break is actually quite interesting,” Schumacher told Sky Deutschland’s podcast, Backstage Boxengasse, “we’ve never had one like this before.

“Of course, there are teams that are struggling right now – Williams, for one – and this presents a huge opportunity for them to make the most of the time.

“Aston Martin, too, and obviously Honda with the issues they’re facing. So these teams naturally have a huge opportunity.”

He added, “It sounds harsh, but I think it’s almost that simple to call Honda that. I’d say Williams is the biggest flop.

“When you consider what sort of engine is in the back and what’s being made of it at the moment, I have to say that Williams, with a car that’s apparently almost 30kg too heavy, is a real flop.”

Williams’ weight issue had another one of the team’s former drivers, Juan Pablo Montoya, calling for the engineers to be sacked.

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“Personally someone should be held responsible for that,” he told AS Colombia, “and that person shouldn’t be on the team.

“The people on that team and someone who held a position that obviously involved supervising that and making a mistake like that, should be responsible for it and should set a bit of an example for people.

“Not by threatening people, but people have to take responsibility for their work, if you know what I mean? If you’re the captain of, I don’t know, a cruise ship and you sink the ship, you’ll be sacked, if you know what I mean?

“If you’ve got a job to do and you mess it up, you’re out. And so I think that’s important.”

Williams is taking steps to combat the car’s weight issue, but as team principal James Vowles explained, that’s easier said than done in today’s cost cap environment.

Although the Briton has an inbox full of ideas on how to reduce the weight of the car, Williams cannot just throw money at a solution as this year’s budget cap is limited to $215 million, reflecting inflation and expanded cost coverage.

“It is not complicated to bring it down already, and what I have in my inbox today is all of the engineering steps to not just bring it down, but actually be underweight by a good amount,” Vowles told the media in Shanghai.

“If this were not a cost cap world, I would execute it tomorrow, and it would be done in a few weeks. It is not, so you’ve got to time it with when the components effectively start to go out of life, and where we will be bringing upgrades later in the season.

“It is a complexity, but it is a good complexity.

“If it was 20 kilos [overweight], it is more than that. It is not just the effective mass; when people calculate the number, they don’t take into account the centre of gravity (CoG), and how it changes. They do not take into account the impact it has on the harvesting, on the minimum apex speed, which is impacted by the weight.

“It is a significant enough problem that we have made some very serious changes to how we operate, how we work, but it is fixable in the year.”

For Vowles, though, the frustration is that Williams is even in this position.

“That is really important to note,” he continued, “but what is frustrating to me is that the reality behind it is that it is an output from us showing that we are not at a level yet required for such a large regulation change.

“It is not something which happened last year; the car last year was below the weight limit, and I know the rules changed, but our ways of working are not sufficient to be able to deal with this amount of change.

“In a really weird way, I’m very happy as there is nothing in the company anymore which is hidden, and it is all fixable, and we are not that far away from fixing it. But the output of it is an overweight car that we have to deal with at the start of the season.”

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