Minichamps 1:43 Williams FW45 – Alexander Albon, United States GP (Austin) 2023 Art. 417231923

A 1:43 model of the Williams FW45 as raced by Alexander Albon to ninth place at the 2023 United States Grand Prix in Austin. Resin, in a protective display case.

Williams was tracking twenty thousand parts in a spreadsheet

James Vowles arrived as team principal at the start of 2023, from Mercedes, and gave an interview a few months later that became the defining anecdote of the team's decline.

He had asked for a list of the car's components and their status. Williams produced an Excel file with around 20,000 entries, maintained by hand. There was no proper database, no automated tracking of where a part was in manufacture, no way to answer quickly whether a modification had reached the factory floor.

His point was not that the staff were incompetent. It was that Williams had spent two decades without the money to buy the systems every rival had, and that a team can lose a tenth of a second a lap simply by being slow at knowing things.

The FW45 was the product of that. It was quick on straights, because that costs less to get right, and poor in slow corners, because that requires the sort of iterative aerodynamic development the team could not run. At Austin, with its long back straight, Albon finished ninth.

Williams has since rebuilt its systems, and the car is a different proposition.

In the range

Set 417231902 is his team-mate Logan Sargeant's car from the same race — the one that scored the only point of his career.

Specifications

Scale: 1:43 · Resin · Protective display case · Limited edition · Age: 15+