How Williams' new leader forged his data-driven F1 ethos

You probably knew the voice before you saw the face. Soft-edged but empowered by the weight of authority, and destined to lap the Formula 1 internet for all eternity: “Valtteri, it’s James…”

James Vowles joined what was then known as British American Racing in 2001 as an engineer,
one of the hundreds of F1 personnel the casual TV viewer might never see. He remained there through its several incarnations and built up its strategic facility from zero to a highly effective fighting force – but even then he remained relatively low-profile unless you were one of the select group of journalists invited by Mercedes to one of his fascinatingly detailed briefings.

That changed in the Liberty era, when greater deployment of team radio in ‘the show’ led to a more front-of-house role during a number of memorable exchanges, from apologising to Lewis Hamilton for not taking the opportunity to pit during a Virtual Safety Car in the 2018 Austrian GP to politely but firmly instructing Bottas to let his team-mate past in Sochi later that season. While there were some, including lesser media outlets, who saw this as a functionary being thrown under the bus by team boss Toto Wolff, either to take responsibility for a blunder or to deliver bad news, those who knew, knew: Vowles was instrumental to the big decisions that made Mercedes such a phenomenal fighting force… and unafraid to wear the consequences of the calls that went wrong. Little wonder that when Williams and Mercedes co-ordinated their announcements that he was to replace Jost Capito at the head of ‘Team Willy’, Merc’s headline was “Williams, it’s James…”

GP Racing: You’ve said that motorsport is one of your abiding passions, one of the things that keeps you happy – where did it all begin for you?

James Vowles: I think like many – as a child I watched it on TV. I’m highly competitive, I have been all my life. And that’s really what appeals to me, the ability to see a whole group of individuals who are focused the way I am, doing everything it takes to be just ahead of their rivals. But at the time I didn’t think this would be a professional career – I had no awareness of whether there would be a place for someone like me in it.

I studied mathematics and computer science at university, not because I thought I wanted a career those subjects, but because I was good at them. And fundamentally back then – this was the late 1990s – there was a demand for that within the world. But about eight months into the degree I realised this wasn’t somewhere I could spend all of my life. So I applied to all the Formula 1 teams and got rejected by all of them, some more directly than others. But there were two very helpful replies, one of them was Williams, and I put all the letters up on my wall with Blu Tack.

Vowles faces a grilling by GP Racing

Photo by: Alister Thorpe / GP Racing

GPR: That’s a sign of the times – nobody bothers sending rejection letters anymore…

JV: They don’t, do they? But I kept all the letters and because I’m… tenacious might be another word for it, that [working in F1] became the objective. This is where I’ll go with my life. The helpful responses were along the lines of “we don’t need mathematicians, we need engineers, you have a very varied background, you have languages, you have other things that most of us wouldn’t – but you need the engineering disciplines”. So I finished off the first degree and did a master’s in engineering [at Cranfield], worked at the same time in Formula 3 and at Le Mans to build up a portfolio of teams. One of the projects we had to do at university was to design a car as a small group. We won an award and in the audience were two people from F1 teams. And a job offer came in very shortly after that, which was fantastic – a job that was made for me.

GPR: This was with British American Racing?

JV: Yes, I’d applied for a job as a test engineer and been for interview. I’d done race engineering in F3 and at Le Mans, so it made some sense to step up to that role. But actually, they realised it was unusual to have someone who had race engineering experience, but also software, vehicle dynamics and other elements. So they forged a role that was a link between those, just for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. It was special because it gave me the ability to work across five or six different departments with no one defined job.

"I applied to all the Formula 1 teams and got rejected by all of them, some more directly than others" James Vowles

In the early 2000s strategy didn’t exist as a proper area of focus. It was more something that on a Saturday night you’d sit with the drivers and go, “Do you want one stop or two? Great, done, finished, let’s go for dinner.” There was very little science behind it. Given my background in mathematics and computer science I decided I should put some effort to this, do it properly, do some proper data systems. So we wrote models, really me at first and then we built up a team of two – when I left it was a team of nine or 10. But you started seeing real results from doing this in an analytical, data-driven way rather than heuristics [trial and error] and feel. In the early 2000s the team was a little bit all over the place but going through 2003 then 2004, it started to grow quite significantly. And that was the region where this kicked in a lot more.

Teams were 250 people, maybe up to 400, now they’re nearly 1000. So back then you did multiple jobs, which was rewarding but challenging at the same time. By about 2008 my focus became pretty much strategy and I let go of the race engineering side. Nowadays you look back and go, “that makes complete sense”. But in the 2000s it didn’t – you had to pay for yourself by doing other jobs at the same time.

Vowles was in the thick of the F1 data boom in the 2000s

Photo by: Andre Vor / Sutton Images

GPR: A couple of months ago we ran a feature on the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix, where Jordan was video-recording the timing screen to develop strategic tools. And the team was then able to use that to overturn the result. So what was the thought process around that time which led you to realise you could dynamically affect the outcome of races by having a better understanding of where cars were on track?

JV: Indeed, back then you had to do some pretty awful techniques. Videoing the recording screen was one of them. Then using OCR [optical character recognition], you’d literally ‘scrape’ the numbers and letters to build up a timing database because timing didn’t come live. Those were really fun years because you were finding methods that allowed you to get as much data as possible on all of your competitors. The first thing was to put it all into data, so the timing was a data stream rather than a video stream and you could then manipulate and do some clever things with it. Eventually Formula 1 did the right thing, which was to provide us with the live data streams – once they realised all the teams were extrapolating it themselves. Once you have that, you can build a track map of all the cars moving and have an awareness of where they are. Before then, even telemetry was mostly burst, you didn’t really know where your car was on the track, apart from the three sector lines and the speed trap lines. When you can start moving 20 dots round a screen, that’s potent and powerful compared with what you had before. You can figure out how long it takes to do a pitstop and therefore where you’ll drop out into the field. And then you can start calculating the effects of diminishing fuel load and tyre degradation: what your lap time is going to be five or 10 laps from now.

And back then you had refuelling, so you could calculate how long a stint would be as a maximum from how long a car spent in the pitlane. You could figure out quite accurately what strategy your rivals were doing, and what the race result would look like barring weather or Safety Cars. That was the journey of strategy in the early 2000s and you got quite good by the end of it. Certainly with refuelling, it was actually a very predictable entity as a strategist, you could really figure out what was going to happen in the race quite early on.

GPR: Was there a gap between your perception of what working for an F1 team would be like, and your experience when you actually got in there? I went to the launch of the 2KQ sportscar in Brackley in early 2000, back when Reynard was making the BAR F1 car but still doing other projects. And I remember Adrian Reynard climbing all over the car and standing on the rear wing to demonstrate the strength of it. Baffling – the sort of thing you expect an American second-hand car salesman to do on their local TV spot. The perception was it got a little bit more serious when David Richards took charge at the end of 2001…

JV: I would completely agree with you. He was a great leader – I learned a lot from him. He took the team in a different direction of travel. Geoff Willis [technical director] came in at the same time from Williams. And it was a huge step up in terms of understanding where we were. Certainly in the earlier days there was a lot of heuristics and feel. That doesn’t exist today. But it did exist 20 years ago because there wasn’t enough data – the car itself would only have 16-32 channels of data, now it’s tens of thousands.

Vowles learned a lot from Richards, who took over BAR in 2001

Photo by: LAT Photographic

I certainly remember a number of years where we weren’t performant. And it wasn’t a data-driven exercise we were going through, it was a heuristic discussion exercise as to what we should be doing. Experiments conducted without data, but rather more based on feel. Now ultimately, I’d probably argue all of those years the car just didn’t have enough downforce. There are other things as well. It was hard, harder than I expected. I worked long hours – there were times I’d fall asleep on the garage floor, because it was three or four in the morning and you were still doing an engine change. In one case we were testing in Bahrain for about 14 days solid. And that starts to wear you down to a level that’s really hard to explain.

GPR: Do you find that there’s a difference between perception and reality in F1 strategy? To my mind the armchair experts don’t really understand risk, and tend to judge the quality of a strategy based on its outcome rather than on the information available at the time the decisions were made…

JV: I would never come to you and say you don’t know what you’re talking about. But what I have done with people is to lay out the information that was in front of us when we made a decision: here’s why we made it and here’s why it didn’t work out. Here’s also why it could have worked out and what the implication would have been with it. There’s a probability attached to everything. No one knows with certainty what is going to happen in the future. You’re often making decisions perhaps six laps before people think you’re making them – the whole trigger of what performance you do, what [engine] modes you use, your resources, that doesn’t happen in the moment – that happens before then [a pitstop].

"If we start with people and culture, the fundamentals of it, culture doesn’t change overnight. And it doesn’t change just because I say “this is the culture I want”. It changes from the bottom up because your organisation buys into the direction of travel" James Vowles

By the way, there are some that were complete blunders, there’s no question about it! In hindsight, you go, “yeah, that was completely wrong”. I have no fear about admission of guilt. If you actually lay out the really difficult decisions and probabilistically where they end up, you’re playing a chess game against other people – it could be one other, it could be five or six at same time – and what you’re doing is trying to force them into a move that is putting them into a checkmate situation. And it’s difficult to do that, because they’re trying to do the same to you.

But some of the best races I’ve had as a strategist were some of the Barcelonas or Budapests, where you can just see the whole build-up to what you’re doing to that competitor many laps before. And the finale was as our tools predicted. And it’s this beautiful finish. But you can see the build-up where you force them – they have no choice but to keep going with a one-stop. And they’re finished. They’re done. You’ve created that whole scenario based on where you’ve been stopping – and the same applies to other races where we’ve had our hands forced and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Williams has been "surviving" for years but under Vowles he hopes to lead the team back to the front

Photo by: Alister Thorpe / GP Racing

There are very few races where you’re sitting there completely happy. There’s normally a tiny hydraulic leak or something going on, you can’t do a pitstop because the brakes are hitting 900 degrees and they’ll explode if you stop. Suddenly your options get limited. And so they look foolish to the outside world, but there’s logic and reason behind what’s going on. But as I said, there’s others I’ve done that I’ll have to live with forever. Horrible, horrible decisions.

GPR: There are lots of people who have a very firm set of assumptions about where Williams has been going wrong. From your very first appearance in public as team principal you’ve faced questions based on those assumptions. But presumably, being from a data-driven background,
you’ve approached your first months in the job with an open mind and that’s why you’ve talked about change as being a multi-year process?

JV: I wish it could be done in days or weeks. But if we start with people and culture, the fundamentals of it, culture doesn’t change overnight. And it doesn’t change just because I say “this is the culture I want”. It changes from the bottom up because your organisation buys into the direction of travel you’re going in. And in organisations this size it’s normally three to four years to change – and our culture is just one aspect of things. By ‘culture’ I don’t mean nasty characteristics. This organisation has been what I would call ‘surviving’ for many years. And what that means is if you go back to the early 2000s, all you thought about was, “What do we do for next weekend? OK, let’s think a bit further ahead. What do we do for two weekends ahead?” That’s where this organisation was when I joined, because the finances weren’t there, the systems weren’t there.

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So here’s the cultural change: I don’t want you thinking about next weekend anymore, I want you thinking about 2025 and 2026. That’s a big change from what the organisation has been used to. It’s hard because every two weeks you get a slap in the face – because that’s what a grand prix is, the way we’re performing. And I get carried away with it as well, I want to be better in Canada than I was in Barcelona for instance. But irrespective of that, if we focus on just those small details, we’re never going to be making steps forward relative to the field.

So let’s now start thinking ahead of that. No one will be reflected or viewed on what our performance is over the next 12 months. We will, however, be making sure we put systems, structures and processes in place. And here’s where we’re strong. If you’re Alpine, you can’t redevelop yourself – they’re successful, but you can’t redevelop yourself to become necessarily top three. We can and that’s a strength we have on our side – and I’ll create the empowerment to do that. So that’s the number one change.

The second is there’s a lot of infrastructure missing here, many elements that are still very much from 20-25 years ago, and which need modernisation. Even if we broke ground tomorrow, that’s an 18-to-24-month journey to bring ourselves into a situation that’s competitive relative to our rivals. If you rush it, if you put a sticking plaster over it, we’ll find a small gain. But that’s not what I want for this organisation. What I want, and what the investments around us are intended to do, is to bring us back towards the front.

Vowles has made it clear Williams' transformation will take many years to complete

Photo by: Williams

GPR: It’s noticeable that you’ve been very careful to avoid saying there’s just one or two things you need to do – hire a new technical director, redevelop the wind tunnel – and then everything is OK.

JV: You’ve nailed it, there’s no individual change that will fix this organisation moving forward. Part of the benefit I’ve had is that I’ve lived and breathed in one of the most successful organisations ever in team sports. So I have a vision of what excellence looks like. But everything needs to be brought up at the same time – you’re always going to be held back by the elements of the organisation that aren’t where we need to be. We absolutely need a good technical director, and there’ll be good news [Williams has since announced the signing of Pat Fry from Alpine as its new chief technical officer] on that within a few months. But that’s a part of the journey, not the whole journey. That doesn’t fix things. It’s not one individual, it’s everything being brought up at the same time.

"We have a fantastic British legacy team which has the opportunity to get back towards the front. The investment is very much long-term. It’s part of the reason I joined because that’s my vision as well" James Vowles

GPR: This was a family business. It’s not anymore, it’s a franchise. So you’re also having to expand in other areas as well, such as Esports. How long-term are the owners thinking? Something like 10 years and another 800 races before they think of moving on the franchise?

JV: Longer than that, it’s part of the discussions we’ve had all the way through this process. The direction of travel is very straightforward and simple. If they wanted to make money out of it, they would have sold in the past few months because, relative to the buying point, this is a great point to be selling. That’s not their interest. We have a fantastic British legacy team which has the opportunity to get back towards the front. The investment is very much long-term. It’s part of the reason I joined because that’s my vision as well. I’m not interested in something that becomes good in two or three years and gets rotated because it’s sixth. I’m here because we have a unique opportunity from the ground up to develop an organisation to be frontrunning.

Can Vowles guide Williams back to the very top of F1?

Photo by: Alister Thorpe / GP Racing