James Vowles, Williams’ newly appointed Team Principal, claims that he has known failure before, a factor which will help him deal with the challenges of his new role.
Williams, once a great Formula 1 force with nine Constructors’ Crowns, has been languishing in the back end of the grid for years, and nothing seems to be working as they try to emerge from the ditch they’ve been in for some time now.
Even when Dorilton Capital acquired the team back in 2020, ousting the Williams family – Claire Williams – from the management and with former boss Jost Capito at the helm, the team failed to recover, finishing the 2022 season last in the Constructors’ Championship.
But now the team has a new boss, in the form James Vowles, formerly the Chief Strategist at Mercedes, who after his appointment was asked what he think is wrong with Williams and what he plans to do to fix it.
Hard to know what went wrong for Williams
Vowles responded; quoted by F1’s official website: “It’s hard to answer what’s wrong simply because as I speak to you all here, I haven’t set foot inside. My contact has been fairly limited, for purposeful reasons, I’m still in the transition point.
“What will definitely be wrong is when you are hurting, and when you have been punished, and you’ve been pushed down as an organisation, because you are suffering, that doesn’t get better year on year, unless you get a change to what’s going on,” he predicted.
“A change to the culture, a change to the methods, and systems. I suspect a lot of it was that, if we go back a few years, we didn’t have the strength that [owners] Dorilton [have brought],” Vowles continued.
“Dorilton really want and will invest the correct amount to make this a prominent team. And I don’t think that was fair to say that was the case just a few years ago, and the impact of them will take a while to properly kick in.”
Vowles might be leaving a winning team in Mercedes, but working in Brackley since 2010, under the team’s previous guises, he endured some tough and disappointing times, something he intends to capitalize on as he plans to lead his new team Williams out of the woods.
A new team boss is only one change
“I am one change but clearly one individual won’t make it,” he pointed out. “What is required is a re-strengthening of the technical team, but also allowing those internally that are incredibly good to shine and prosper, and I suspect the environment that they’ve had around isn’t one that would be have been conducive to that for a period of time.
“What I’m doing different is that I am fortunate enough to have known failure on levels that unfortunately many of you have publicly seen. Even prior to Mercedes, there were times that we were lavishing in a very poor position. We didn’t score a point for twelve races,” the Briton explained.
He added: “The real gain that you get out of this is that you have to instill a culture that allows everyone to realise that you have to be empowered, you have to grow, you have to move forward as a unit together, and it has to be one collaborative motion.
“And I strongly suspect that they’ve put themselves in a situation where that collaboration isn’t quite as good as it could be or should be, just simply because it has been quite a few years of pain that has cemented it,” Vowles predicted.