Williams scored points in five grands prix last year, but the 2025 season has been a transformation, with the team racking up more than 100 points with seven races still to run
‘Given the change of regulation that’s coming up, we continued our development with the current car,’ says Paul Williams, chief trackside engineer at Williams Racing. ‘We had also brought forward some of the developments that we had planned for the 47 onto the 46 [such as] a new front suspension geometry, which we brought to Singapore.’ The main task in the first half of 2024, then, was to reduce the FW46’s weight, while high attrition and a mid-season driver swap masked the true effectiveness of performance-seeking updates. It was a challenging year. That said, the team felt it had developed the FW46 into a workable platform by the time the season ended, laying solid foundations for what would become the 2025 car.
‘Generally, the focus on this year’s car has been total load characteristics, to try and improve our combined entry characteristics and our response in terms of yaw and certain wind behaviours’ Paul Williams, chief trackside engineer at Williams Racing
As Williams mentions, the FW47 front suspension was unrolled during the 2024 season. Other developments, however, had to wait until the winter, such as a re-packaging of the coolers to free up space around the upper body surface, which is important for controlling airflow to the rear. When the FW47 broke cover, it had a noticeably flatter upper sidepod surface, a lower and wider central cooling exit and a more convex lower section of the engine cover.
Total focus ‘Generally, the focus on this year’s car has been total load characteristics, to try and improve our combined entry characteristics and our response in terms of yaw and certain wind behaviours,’ says Williams. ‘The other area we struggled with at the start of the FW46 was weight. So, there was a clear focus from the team on mass saving, with this year’s car running pretty much on weight all year.’ One substantial difference between the FW46 and FW47 is the use of Mercedes’ 2024 pushrod rear suspension, which wasn’t available for Williams to use on last year’s car (though fellow Mercedes power unit customers, Aston Martin and McLaren, did have it). Mercedes provides the gearbox, and the suspension mountings that radiate from it, but Williams is responsible for the rods’ aerodynamic shrouding.
The FW46 of 2024 (above) had a more pronounced, valley-like depression at the rear of the sidepod, while the FW47 (below) has a more consistent profile in that area
NOVEMBER 2025 www.racecar-engineering.com 15