After a painful 2024 season for Williams F1 Racing team principal James Vowles reflected on what went wrong for the Grove-based team.
The British engineer has admitted many times that a lot needs to change within the structure of the Grove organisation, in terms of infrastructure and technology.
Nonetheless, 2024 was pretty brutal. A series of crashes between all three drivers hurt them. The mechanics had plenty of extra work to do. The car was also overweight at the start of the year.
In the end, they could only manage P9 in the Constructors’ Championship.
The Williams F1 boss conceded they went a bit too far changing things last year.
“We have to change a lot within our organisation in terms of infrastructure and technology to get us to the right place,” he stated.
“And there’s a sign called change saturation. You can change things at a certain rate. You go too far and you break it – in hindsight, moving things a little bit further than we can really deal with in one go.
“But we won’t undo that learning. That learning will stay with us now for the rest of time. So it’s a positive, just damaged by a negative. And what I’m saying by that is, ‘yep, that’s absolutely spot-on’.”
Vowles has admitted to this season being a good lesson for Williams F1 team.
“But we didn’t get it all right, which is why we’re not fighting for those positions. That’s a reflection of where we are as a team and where I want us to be as a team.”
The 2024 season saw a large amount of destruction. It resulted on plans for 2025 getting delayed.
Williams started the season with the Albon-Sargeant pairing, but after large amounts of damage from the latter, we saw a mid-season switch from Sargeant to Colapinto.
Although this switch was meant to create less damage and therefore less hits to the budget cap, Colapinto and Albon continued to cause damage to the cars with a series of accidents.
In the eyes of James Vowles, last year was short-term pain for long-term gain for Williams Racing. He is willing to sacrifice the 2024 and 2025 seasons in order to nail the new regulations.
“I always said from the beginning, before we started the year, we were going to sacrifice 2024 and 2025. This is a little bit what the sacrifice looks like, just with a lot more attrition than I expected.”
Vowles said that from the start of his position as team principal, the agreement between himself and team owner Dorilton Capital was always to find long term solutions, rather than short-term goals that could paper over the cracks.
“It was part of the agreement from the get-go when I joined, which is no one, neither side, wants any short-term fixes. Everything is doing right for the future.
“Nothing should be a sticky plaster. Sticky plasters look good, create a veneer, and then it falls over pretty quickly. It could be a year, it could be three years, but it falls over. Do this right that we’re building a team that is successful for many years to come. So in answer to that, it’s mutual buy-in for us.”
With the 2025 season already being marked as somewhat of a write off for Williams, James Vowles has begun to put more pressure on himself for the 2026 campaign, and the performance they will be expected to show.
“What we already know internally is ‘26 isn’t going to be the be-all and end-all,” he added. “It will just be a positive step in the right direction. ‘27, ‘28 should be steps above that.
“And really, from ‘25 onwards, we’re just starting to see the fruits of the labour that we’ve been getting, in the last few years, delivered.”
