F1 chief says some of his team’s facilities are 20 years out of date compared to rivals

Follow us on Google Discover

Williams chief technical officer Pat Fry has admitted that some of the team’s facilities are now up to 20 years out of day compared to their rivals.

Fry was speaking on the F1 Nation Podcast at the conclusion of the 2023 Formula 1 season.

Team principal James Vowles will be pleased but not thrilled with how Williams performed this year.

In Alex Albon, they have one of the most impressive drivers on the grid who isn’t in a championship-challenging car right now.

The 27-year-old drove the wheels off the FW45 and he’ll be delighted to have improved on the four points he scored last season.

After dropping Nicholas Latifi, there was always going to be an adjustment period for Logan Sargeant.

He’s not entirely convinced and is still waiting to find out whether he’ll still be with the team in 2024.

Midway through the season, Williams brought in Pat Fry from Alpine to take over as chief technical officer.

Fry is exceptionally experienced in Formula 1 and has played a part in more than 60 Grand Prix wins.

However, Fry has admitted that while some of the facilities at Williams are first-class, there are others in desperate need of improvement.

The recently introduced spending cap in F1 makes that more difficult and arguably punishes smaller teams even more than the giants of the sport.

Fry says some Williams facilities are out of date

Speaking about his first few months with the team, Fry said: “Well we certainly have a lot of catching up to do. Some bits of the company are if anything better than where I’ve come from [at Alpine], there’s other bits that you can could say are 15, 20 years out of date.

“So, we’ve certainly got a lot of work to do and it’s not just the machinery or the tools as such, it’s also the methodologies we use to actually design a car.

“So, we need to be thinking about all of those, trying to move to the 21^st century of actually designing things.”

It will be interesting to see how much Williams prioritise upgrading the facilities that Fry is speaking about.

They’ve got to find a way over the summer to breach the gap between their car and Alpine in sixth and eventually the top five manufacturers.

That won’t be easy, but the improvement Aston Martin and McLaren showed last year shows that it can be done.

Whether they can do that before the major rule changes come in 2026 is another matter.

The team might decide to instead focus fully on that car, although that would be a huge risk.