Is the Williams revival still on track?

Sentimentality is in short supply in modern Formula 1, and so it should be; a rich heritage is not a prerequisite of success, and neither does it guarantee that. Just ask the spectre of Lotus, or Brabham, or any of the other teams whose past glories eluded them when their coffers became conspicuously bare in the early 1990s. 

Williams was not far from enduring a similar fate just five years ago. The effect of underinvestment began to snowball: car development troubles rolled the team towards the rear of the field; sponsors began to flock to more successful teams; and the Grove squad had to look to drivers to fill the void in its precarious bank balance. 

When Dorilton Capital acquired the team from the Williams family, it was tinged with bittersweetness. The team that Sir Frank Williams had built and taken to championship titles throughout the 1980s and 1990s was now enfranchised to do more than merely survive, but without the familial ties that had continued under daughter Claire’s stewardship of the team.  

But it took time to shake off the survival mentality, hence the appointment of James Vowles as team principal last year. Progress under ex-VW motorsport chief Jost Capito had stalled in 2022, and the team slipped to the bottom of the order once again, prompting a change of management.

Vowles, a pitwall mainstay during Mercedes’ period of dominance, had been tasked with steering the ship into more harmonious waters. It aligned with progress in 2023; like its predecessor, the FW45 was a particularly ‘peaky’ car and terrified its midfield rivals in the higher-speed circuits, yet was not entirely balanced across the board.  

Vowles tasked the team with rectifying that for this year’s FW46, all under a new framework that aimed to eliminate contingency measures that would speed up the car build process at the expense of performance. Have the opening seven races been a fair reflection of that? Yes, but also no.

Watch: James Vowles' Impact at Williams - Is the Revival Working?

The push to cut contingencies – the process of cannibalising older parts or building new ones from easier to produce, but heavier, materials – ultimately pushed back the completion date of the FW46, as anticipated. But the overall performance hoped for has not come to pass, and the team currently sits pointless after the opening quarter of the season. 

Lead driver Alex Albon, thanks to his impressive performances over the past two seasons, was linked to a potential Red Bull return for 2026. Perhaps, given Williams’s recent form, he’d be inclined to hedge his bets and put pen to paper on a mooted exclusivity deal for 2026. Instead, the Anglo-Thai has thrown his lot in with Williams long-term. Evidently, there’s something among 2024’s disappointment thus far to hang his hat on, starting with the clearest takeaway from the team’s lack of performance.  

Vowles revealed last weekend at Imola that the new Williams was still overweight. He estimated that this was costing the team almost half a second per lap and, according to popular paddock maths, this puts the new car 10kg above its target. A new floor taken to the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix is the first step of many expected to cut the mass, but it could be considered alarming that this has been allowed to happen despite the new processes put in place. 

"The disappointment is that the drivers are literally sitting there going, 'It's a really good balance, I’m looking forward to using it'"
James Vowles

But, Vowles says, this is still a byproduct of facilities that have not been fully updated to match the mod-cons that many of the teams among the upper echelon have in place. Over his past 15 months in charge, investment has been directed into the areas that Vowles has deemed worthy of immediate attention, but there’s still a lot more that requires an overhaul. 

“You can bring good concepts, ideas, you can change things,” Vowles begins in a conversation with Autosport. “But in an organisation that doesn’t have the facilities, process, structure and systems, what happens is there’s always an outlet. And the outlet is, in the circumstance that we have here, weight gets added to the car.

“So the disappointment is that the drivers are literally sitting there going, ‘It’s a really good balance, I’m looking forward to using it.’ But when you’re carrying around that much excess weight, you struggle to move forward. That’s the disappointing bit.

“Some of it is not a surprise to me. I knew that coming into it and, as I said to everyone, this isn’t a journey of one year. We’ve got to add technology, we’ve got to add systems and process, and we have to undo 20 years’ worth of elements, and that doesn’t happen overnight. I’d like it to, but it doesn’t.”

Williams is still carrying excess weight which is hampering its efforts to move up the grid

Photo by: Williams

Those “20 years’ worth of elements” that Vowles mentions were alluded at the very start of the Briton’s tenure, where his first tours of the Grove factory had revealed some antiquated machinery that was first used in the BMW years. Autosport’s flippant remark that Williams was set to uncover something worthy of Antiques Roadshow was met with Vowles’s dry riposte of, “It has, I assure you!”

To a football fan, Williams’s uptick in performance in 2023 that allowed it to reach seventh in the constructors’ championship could be down to the “new manager bounce”, and Vowles is now experiencing “second-season syndrome” at the helm among a congested lower midfield pack. But running an F1 team is more nuanced; motorsport is an engineering competition disguised as a sport and, if the pieces at the factory are not in place, then it directly correlates to performance at the track.

It’s also important to note that the FW46 is a very different prospect to its predecessors. Williams could have persisted with its previous lineage of top-speed monsters and that would net immediate returns at circuits such as Monza, Spa or Montreal. But, Vowles explains, the current calendar is so broad that this is an approach that cannot work long term beyond yielding more token results on a small subset of circuits. 

“A peaky car works if you have 16 races and therefore, uh, five of them, a third of them, you can get [into the points],” Vowles explains. “We have 24 races now, [so that] won’t net you much in the championship, except when you’re fighting for a couple of points. So change has to happen at some point. And how do you go about that?

“A lot of it went back down to foundations. A lot of it was giving the wind tunnel team the breadth of, basically, ‘You can explore these areas. These are your limits, but you can explore these areas.’ 

“The previous way of doing it, you would constrain the wind tunnel to say you can add SCz [a scaled force coefficient in the z-axis], you can add downforce, but this is the ratio of drag you can add it at, which is an incredibly tight ratio. And what it means is you throw away concepts and ideas that will actually produce a better car on average across all tracks. 

“Second of all, you don’t simulate across a very tight, narrow band of tracks. You simulate across all of them. Then you go back to more foundations of linking vehicle dynamics to vehicle performance, to aerodynamics.

Albon found joy in 2023 on circuits that demanded good top speed, but Vowles believes a more balanced package was the way to go

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“In other words, you create groups of individuals where performance is their responsibility. Not the responsibility of just aero, but the responsibility of that group of individuals. And when you do that, you set targets on it, which is this car at all races has to be competitive in its format. And that’s how you achieve it fundamentally. You change where the accountability and responsibility goes, and you change the methods and systems of simulation, and you allow aero, frankly, to have more freedom than they had before.” 

It’s difficult to square the circle when balancing short-term and long-term planning in F1, particularly when expectations are usually summarised as “we want results yesterday”. Despite the shortfall in results this term, Albon’s imagination has been sufficiently captured by the project ongoing at Williams, and that “the ceiling at Williams is higher than what we’re showing at the moment”.  

As per the upgrade plan, there are further developments in the works to ensure that the FW46 is more malleable. Should the estimated 0.45-second shortfall be true, this would catapult the team above Haas and Alpine in the pecking order and pitch it around the RB level of performance.

"I would have done it in a slightly different order. As an example, the machine shop is a really good machine shop. But composites isn’t. The car is 75% composites"
James Vowles

The focus is now on shedding that excess weight and getting the car to a level where it is no longer encumbered by the ramifications thereof. It’s low-hanging fruit in theory but, where Vowles is concerned, there are still a lot of changes needed to streamline the departments in the team responsible for the car build. 

One of the areas that he noted was 20 years off the pace of the top teams lay in the composites department, which he felt was of greatest importance when he joined the team. Williams had spent the best part of two seasons augmented by Dorilton investment before he joined the team, and the previous management had started to enact changes around Grove. Vowles agreed that the investment in certain areas of the team had value but, when asked whether he’d have done the same thing had he joined the team at the start of 2021, he noted that he’d have put the money into the composites department first. 

“It’s the exact same question the board asked me after I was in for four months,” he says. “And my answer is the same as I give you. The money has gone into areas that needed finance. Is it the first ones that I would have done? No, but it had to be done because it’s not that you can’t invest in any of these areas.  

“I would have done it in a slightly different order. As an example, the machine shop is a really good machine shop. But composites isn’t. The car is 75% composites. Focus on the composites first. Then, the metals second, from a priority perspective.

Vowles has had to prioritise the infrastructure he wanted to improve, and the immediate benefits of this behind-the-scenes work aren't immediately clear on the track

Photo by: Williams

“I would actually also say that Williams was more advanced in terms of metals than composites – not advanced relative to benchmark, just more advanced, which meant that there was more structure in there about how we invest, and what we need to get out of it. All of the investment that has been done so far, none of it is wasted. It’s just there’s a lot more required.” 

Part of that desired investment into facilities formed the backbone of Williams’s lobbying to expand the capital expenditure regulations dictated by the financial caps. When it became apparent that the financial rules would encroach upon capital expenditure (ie the funds available to acquire or maintain fixed assets, such as machinery or other infrastructure), the top teams could afford to sink money into improving facilities before the rules came into play.

The likes of McLaren and Aston Martin spent big on planning new wind tunnels or, in Aston’s case, an entirely new factory. Williams, on the other hand, did not have the funds to do so until its takeover was completed. 

The previous universal CapEx allowance of $45million (approximately £35m) over four years was changed to a sliding scale based on constructors’ position, so the bottom four teams now get $65m (or £51m) to invest on infrastructure over those four seasons. It’s not the magnitude that Williams had wanted, but it was nonetheless a battle won in its pursuit of a revival. 

It goes beyond the material stocked at the factory too, and Vowles explained that his first hire was actually to bolster the human resources department. Part of that was to challenge the personnel already at Williams with new training, and disposing of a chain of command where all of the decisions were made at the top. The team principal now no longer signs off on every decision – there are various heads of state who can now do so to improve the speed of those choices. 

As one of F1’s most decorated teams, Williams has a well-defined past, although the troughs have surpassed the peaks in recent years. In the present, it is attempting to unlock performance from a car that has its promise weighed down by… well, its own weight. And then there’s the team’s future – one that Vowles reckoned would take at least five years before it could realistically begin to match the upper half of the F1 grid on resource. 

“Weight is the one that everyone out here will understand now, why we’re saying we’re on the right path, but we’ve got a lot of things we need to address and fix,” explains Vowles. “And by the way, I said from the beginning, we’re open about it. Weight is just the one that’s slapping us on the face today, but that’s not the main issue. We’ll solve that very quickly.

Vowles is optimistic that Williams can sort its present troubles with weight, but that won't necessarily mean an immediate upturn

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“I think by 2026 we’ll be in a sensible place, but even then 2026 has very interesting regulations at the moment that reward weight in a way that no other championship has, because it’s such a low number. I don’t believe anyone can hit that. 

“But even beyond there, we need to make sure we have a car that is continuing to add downforce in the wind tunnel at the right rate to a competitive level. That’s got to be number one. It’s got to be that the vehicle dynamics of the car are ones that work well, whether you’re striking a kerb, whether you’re going around a slow-speed, mid-speed, high-speed corner, that you can balance it between low and high.  

“We’re not there yet. We still don’t have the balance that I’d like between low and high-speed corners. We don’t have the kerb strike ability that the Red Bull has, as an example. Weight’s the one you can relate to and what you can portray to the world in a way that everyone will understand. But every single area needs to be brought up.” 

"Where we are today, there’s still a bit more work to be done"
James Vowles

Assuming Williams is still on track, what’s next for the British squad? Vowles doesn’t just want the team to be on a par with the environment he had known inside-out at Mercedes – he wants to surpass it. Attempting to emulate Mercedes’ or Red Bull’s infrastructure from 2022 will be five years out of date by 2027, for example – development of the team’s structure must be done through anticipating new trends. 

“Where we are today, there’s still a bit more work to be done,” he adds. “The future state, I don’t want to take this to just where I knew the best to be within Mercedes and Red Bull. They’re very high standard, as you can tell, you win championships from it.

“What can we do that actually is elevated above that? And that’s really the big question that comes out of it at the moment. That’s the ongoing process that will take a while. And then you put everything around it. That doesn’t mean you stand still. We still have better processes today, and systems and structure than we did before.

“That’s not the end state. The end state is one that I think will be many years away.”

Vowles isn't short on ambition as he aims to see Williams rise to new heights

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images