Williams has confirmed it will not travel to Barcelona for next week’s five-day shakedown, making it the only team to miss the first scheduled on-track running of the 2026 Formula One season entirely.
The team announced it had fallen behind schedule in its build programme for the FW48 and would be absent from the session, which begins on Monday and is being held behind closed doors.
McLaren has said it will skip the opening day but attend thereafter. Williams will not be present at all.
The setback marks an awkward reversal for a team that made a point last year of being the first to both reveal and run its new car on track. It also echoes difficulties from previous seasons under its current rebuilding phase.
In 2024, the FW46 arrived late and overweight following major overhauls to the design and build process. Team principal James Vowles revealed he had discovered shortly after joining that the system was being managed via a large Excel spreadsheet. Delays compounded through the winter and the team resorted to bonding metal into composite components to accelerate stress analysis, a shortcut that consumed development bandwidth later in the year.
Some media outlets have reported that the FW48 failed its crash test, though this is understood to be speculation. Monocoques are typically the first section of the car to be defined, and it would be unusual to subject them to crash testing this late in the build process. Ferrari, Audi and Mercedes are known to have successfully completed their crash-testing procedures in early December.
The Barcelona session has been designated a shakedown rather than a formal test, with teams permitted to run on only three of the five days. It was envisioned as an opportunity to prove out new technologies, including active aerodynamic components that require extended running to evaluate mechanical resilience.
Most teams viewed the session as a chance to accumulate mileage before focusing on performance work during the subsequent Bahrain tests.
McLaren chief designer Rob Marshall indicated his team intended to understand its new car before committing to upgrades, saying it was better to learn about the platform before redesigning it.
The primary consequence for Williams is that any shakedown work it would have completed in Barcelona must now take place in Bahrain, reducing time available for performance testing ahead of the season opener in Melbourne.
