Williams Formula 1 team principal James Vowles has explained how the team responded to one of its cars being disqualified from qualifying for the Dutch Grand Prix due to a rearward portion of its updated floor being too wide.
Alex Albon?s qualifying result was expunged after the FIA found his car’s floor body to ‘lie outside the regulatory volume’ mentioned in Article 3.5.1a of the technical regulations. That line in the regulations identifies a floor body reference volume, which consists of several measurements that are further defined in Point 5 of the rulebook appendix.
Williams didn’t dispute the accuracy of the FIA measurement system at Zandvoort and accepted its sanction, but pointed out that its own measurement system produced a different result. Ahead of this weekend’s Italian GP at Monza, Vowles explained what Williams did next, both to ensure the car was legal for the race at Zandvoort, and to maintain compliance for subsequent F1 rounds. For the former, Williams removed the surplus floor body material from Albon’s car with 400-grit sandpaper to ensure it could race on Sunday. Albon went on to finish 14th after starting from the back row, but the British-Thai driver reckoned he could have finished in the points without his qualifying DQ.
‘[The] investigation still ongoing, which tells you how complex the problem is,’ said Vowles. ‘We have two sign-off methods at the factory. The first is in a jig, fundamentally...