Photo: Williams Racing
It hasn’t been a bad start to former Mercedes strategy director James Vowles’ term at Williams Racing, despite being somewhat thrown into the deep end by taking up his new role mere weeks before the 2023 season kicked off.
Alexander Albon made it into the points at the season opener in Bahrain, while rookie Logan Sargeant had an encouraging weekend and finished 12th in the Grand Prix.
But Vowles knows his real job is not just to focus on the next race, or even the one after if Williams are going to regain some of the ground the team has lost over the last decade or more. This is a long term project and the 43-year-old engineer is keen not to take shortcuts to make short term gains. He laid this out in a column on the Williams website just after the pre-season test:
“Throughout the entire process, we are looking to set foundations that remain here not for just one year but more three to five years.It takes time to put those in place, it takes time to cement them and for them to take hold.What we cannot do is sacrifice any of those for the short-term benefit of the FW45.That doesn’t mean we’re not going to every single track this season, fighting for every point that’s available to us, it just means that we need to have an eye on the future at all times.”If there’s one thing the Grove based outfit has lacked over the last few years – its stability, and providing that is another top priority for Vowles. Speaking prior to the Bahrain GP, he said:
“Any organisation, irrespective of whether it is a Formula 1 team or otherwise, cannot be a high performing outfit, if you a) take money away from it, and b) basically have such disruption across a number of years that you end up in a poor situation. And that’s where Williams stands. It’s not for lack of good people. It’s just simply lack of stability.”
And it must be said, it’s hard to argue with his statement on stability when you take into account the sale of the company in the middle of 2020, seeing the departure of Claire Williams, replaced as Team Principal by Simon Roberts who then himself was replaced by Jost Capito before his departure at the end of last year along with Technical Director Francois Xavier Demaison, there’s been a lot of changes at the top of Williams Racing over a very short period. And while change can be good, constant change certainly does not a successful team.
As a result, Williams’ new Team Principal hasn’t just inherited a team in need of investment and a new direction, it is also a team in need of recruitment and this is another area Vowles is keen to stress can not be rushed:
“The intent within the organisation is incredibly clear…….if you have a choice between making a decision that improves us next week, or one that can improve us significantly more in six months, 12 months, 24 months, you go with the latter of those two decisions.”
It’s clear that he is a man with a long term plan and that the team’s owners – Dorilton Capital – have shown him that they will provide the resources and investment for him to implement this and not just look for results in the short term.
Vowles knows exactly what it takes to build a team into an organisation that can fight consistently for top positions – he was at Mercedes in 2010 and it was two years before they saw their first victory, and it was 4 years until they won their first constructors title before going on the dominant run from 2014 to 2021.
He is still realistic about what Williams can achieve in a similar time frame:
“A realistic step for this organisation is, first and foremost, make sure that every year we are just edging forward and not stationary. That has to be dream number one.
“Number two is we have to set a sensible period of time in the future – and it’s years – where we start to actually break into it sixth, fifth, fourth.
“From then onwards, the sport will probably have to have some level of political change to allow teams to break into the top three.”
While Williams is not the team languishing at the back of the grid as they were a couple of years ago, they are still not a team looking to “break out” of the midfield as the likes of McLaren and Alpine strive to do, first they must look to consistently fight in the midfield before dreaming even bigger and that is where their new Team Principal’s primary focus currently lies.
