How an F1 team boss spends a grand prix weekend

Thursday

In Austria, we stay in a hotel that’s not too far from the track, about a 10-minute drive. And what’s great about it is that you’re in a mountainous range and, when you wake up in the morning, you smell it. You smell the fact that you’re in this pure air in the middle of the mountains. And I love that about it.

I always like to go in early. It’s not that I want to be the first team principal to arrive – albeit most of the time I can achieve that – but the quiet moment in the morning just gives me time to go over what we’re going to do in the day. So in Austria, I was through the gate probably around 7.40am.

Typically, I start with just a little bit of breakfast. It’s a time to reflect. Catch up on what’s happened the night before. Understand where we are, in case we’ve moved anything from our engineering meetings the night before.

So, it’s really just diving into all of the main structures, more from an engineering side than anything else. And then I take a look at my calendar, just to understand what we’ve got ahead of us on that particular day.

A lot of team principals won’t necessarily be at the track on a Thursday. I like to be there, because it keeps me connected with the team.

On duty for team principals’ ‘presser’ at the Monaco Grand Prix

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Friday

The timing is different at different races, and depending on what’s going on in the garage, but on Friday morning we have ‘team talk’. We bring the whole team into the motorhome to have a review of what happened the last weekend, what we’re expecting this weekend, and what’s happening in the future.

As all of my talks are, it’s a really honest – sometimes brutally honest – chat about where we’re making progress and where we have more work to do. And it’s a great opportunity to solidify the bonds between everyone within the team at the same time.

Then we go straight into media morning. So in Austria, there were three or four media meetings. And then I quite like trying to clear out the F2 time. So, there’s F2 practice in the European events and we’ve got two drivers – Victor Martins and Luke Browning – in this championship.

I like to go to the garage and just watch that happen, if there’s time available to me. But if not, it’s a good opportunity to spend time with the engineers, who will be in discussing what’s going to happen that day.

The bit I love is that cars produce 50,000 to 60,000 channels’ worth of data, so you get an opportunity to see live where you are

During Friday practice, I will be on the pitwall. That’s the fun bit. And it’s not that we forget why we’re here, but the pitwall grounds you – the real job that you’re doing here is making sure that we’re putting a car on the track and making it quick.

The bit I love is cars produce 50,000 to 60,000 channels’ worth of data, so you get an opportunity to see live where you are. And you get a really good feel very quickly for how you are relative to your competition.

The bit that probably the world doesn’t realise is every race we’re trying to bring performance and upgrades. That rate of development is enormous. So you’re always excited to see: have we done enough to just edge forward at this particular event?

In FP1, we saw the car was quick – Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz were P7 and P8. But it was still really tough to get actually the lap out of it consistently. We could, but it took us a few attempts to get there.

I normally eat during the debrief, just because it overlaps in time – we always debrief after every session. There’s not a lot of free time in the day, so that’s when I’ll make sure I’m putting a tiny bit of lunch into my body. Not a lot.

In the pit garage with Williams board member James Matthews

Photo by: Williams

One in every two or three weekends, I have to attend the team principals’ press conference that takes place on Friday after FP1. When I’m not in the presser – which was the case in Austria – I’ll take time to meet with Stefano Domenicali or other team principals in that period of time.

It’s just about making sure I touch base with everyone up and down the paddock. In Austria, myself and the other team principals got together three times across the weekend to talk about various issues, problems, and the future of the sport.

And then it’s time for FP2. Alex and Carlos ended that session in P16 and P17. But often what we won’t be open about is that we’re playing around with fuel and engine modes in all of these sessions.

It’s not to play games – it’s because we have tests that we’re trying to carry out. So I wasn’t terribly worried about the fact that we were on the back foot in FP2. I knew where we were on fuel and energy modes, and I was quite comfortable in that regard.

And it was the long run that was particularly exciting. We did around a 12-lap run, which was very, very quick.

Although I’m usually one of the first team principals to arrive in the morning, I’m not typically the last to leave. It’s not that I leave particularly early in the evening, but our engineers are caught by a curfew, so they have to leave at a certain point.

And once they’ve left the track, yes, there are still programmes running back at the factory, but I’ll actually get a summary of that the next morning.

So now, it’s just a question of what events we have. We have fantastic partners, and especially at races like Austria, it’s a great opportunity to spend time with some of those partners in the evening. So that’s more where your evening turns into – we almost treat it as commercial time.

Vowles takes time to greet special guests of the team

Photo by: Williams

Saturday

Again, I come in super-early. We debrief what happened overnight in terms of everything engineering – followed by more media meetings. Then there’s a mixture of still meeting up with various team principals up and down the paddock and meet-and-greets with some of our commercial partners.

And then I go back into engineering. You want to understand: what are we doing before we go into FP3? What have we learned overnight? Where are the drivers at? What have they seen and learned? Just making sure I understand where we are and provide a contribution if I can.

After FP3, I’ll spend some time making sure I understand what run plans we’re doing in qualifying, what tyres we’re using, what time we’re leaving the garage approximately, and what our concerns are at that point, if there are any. So before we go out, I’m not taking useful bandwidth from anyone asking questions.

I don’t want to take over, because while that may produce a successful result once, you undermine your team, who are there working every hour and overnight in order to get us the best results

We qualified in P12 and P19. Unfortunately, we found floor damage on both Carlos’s and Alex’s cars during the session. The kerbs in Austria are aggressive and, with such a tight field, we have to use every millimetre of the track to stay competitive – but that ended up costing both drivers some performance.

Sunday

Normally I’ve been in since 8am, so it gives us a couple of hours just to decompress and relax. In Austria, I spent half an hour with Carlos. He and I just caught up on various topics.

Then our strategy meeting would normally be about 10am, which is both drivers, race engineers, strategists and myself talking through what we think may happen in the race. Rarely does that happen, but that doesn’t matter. That’s not what strategy is about. Strategy is about preparing you for some uncertainty so that everyone, when something does happen, is a lot more in tune with each other.

Strategy was always my main focus but, now that I’m team principal, I’m able to take a step back from it. My job in all of this is to provide guidance, if I think the direction they’re taking is different from what I would be doing. I ask questions like: have you thought about this? What happens if this happens?

I don’t want to take over, because while that may produce a successful result once, you undermine your team, who are there working every hour and overnight in order to get us the best results.

Vowles relishes being on the pitwall – it’s the “fun bit” that also “grounds you”

Photo by: Williams

And it depends on where we are, but about 11 o’clock on a Sunday, our motorhome will be filled with people. You won’t be able to move! So it’s just going around, seeing who we’ve got, meeting and greeting, and saying hello to everyone. And then before you know it, the cars are fired up and leaving for the laps to grid. So you trigger yourself back into racing.

Unfortunately, we had a very disappointing race. We had the pace to comfortably finish sixth, and yet we walked away with a double DNF. After Alex had retired, I stayed on the pitwall all the way through until the race finished. If I did jump off, it would only be to inspect the cars.

But I’m still interested in what’s happening elsewhere, what data we are gathering, what’s going on up and down the field. And I think it’s also a good way of showing respect to other competitors who are still racing. So I stayed there until the end.

What we did do is I provided an opportunity for the drivers to debrief earlier. So we were debriefing during the race as well. While Carlos didn’t do much, a debrief is still useful, before we go into a much bigger debrief on Monday altogether.

I left the track very early that day – probably around 5.45pm. The reason being was that my wife was very pregnant – could have been any minute. So I wanted to make sure I was as close as possible to the UK in case anything happened.

Normally I would leave much later, perhaps three hours after the race is finished. So this was just a little bit sooner. But we always fly back on Sunday.

Interestingly, the way my brain works is that the Austria timetable doesn’t help me anymore in my future world, so that’s now been eradicated from my mind.

Knowing what I’ll be doing at our next race is actually the most useful thing I can now fill my brain with – so it’s really just about pushing out the old information and replacing it with the new.

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A disappointing race in Austria ended in a double DNF

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images