Why Williams problems are worse than previously known

Famously, the venerable British rock band Status Quo – who, besides opening Live Aid in 1985, recorded 33 studio albums and notched up 22 UK top 10 hits over the course of a long career – were lampooned for supposedly constructing all their songs from the same three chords played in a different order. In Formula 1 a similar process appears to be under way at Williams, albeit less lucratively.

This week Williams re-signed both its drivers, Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz, to contract extensions. That was the good news in a season which has carried a familiar, if disappointing, theme of underperformance.

Final build of the FW48 was complicated by failures in the crash-testing process, causing delays which forced the team to cancel its participation in the Barcelona ‘shakedown week'. Upon arrival it was overweight, so the pre-season issues in effect compounded: development resource naturally focused on weight reduction over adding efficient aerodynamic load. So the upgrade due to be applied in Azerbaijan will represent the first fully aero-focused development package of the year.

This much is obvious to anyone examining the FW48 now in the context of the cars around it on the grid. It looks almost agricultural in comparison.

Williams has already gone through one senior leadership team since current owner Dorilton Capital acquired it in 2020, so naturally there are questions to be asked about how matters have come to this. And those coming from the floor of sundry press conferences are without doubt similar to the ones forming in the minds of the shareholders.

What Vowles is proposing

"We're pretty frank about it, the car that we had in Miami was actually the car that was due to be there for Melbourne," team principal James Vowles said in a press briefing on Friday morning in Zandvoort. "But even the performance items that we have coming to the car now are not the ones that we had planned.

Albon was the highest-placed Williams driver in the Zandvoort sprint, just holding out Lance Stroll for P16

Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images

"The car that I'm talking about right now, today, was one that we had in the wind tunnel in November. So we're not getting a like-for-like comparison of us against our peers at this point in time.

"A lot of that is because we're trying to catch up from a lot of issues that happened this winter, more significant than perhaps even I had communicated at that stage."

Readers could be forgiven for feeling they've heard this tune before, or at least similar chords played in a different order. When the FW46 was late to the start of the 2024 season, Vowles revealed the team's processes were so antediluvian that the car-build process was governed by a vast, unwieldy and not-fit-for-purpose Excel spreadsheet.

Having come from Mercedes, which enjoyed all the resource you would have expect of a team which had dominated the constructors' championship for most of the previous decade, Vowles had tried to transform the design and manufacture process to be closer to the cutting edge. And it appeared to be working: last year Williams made a point of being first not just to launch the FW47, but to get it on the track.

So for the FW48 to be completed late and be well off the pace on track is a very publicly retrograde step. Besides the well-documented weight issues it has conceptual flaws such as a noticeably high rake (in common with only Aston Martin) where the frontrunning cars have found performance in running much lower rear ride heights. 

Unpicking the reasons for this is a delicate process, because nobody who works in Formula 1 clocks into the office with the aim of doing a poor job. Equally, Williams is a team that has been left behind by developments, as evinced by some of the outmoded working practices Vowles has highlighted.

Thynne has been recruited to solve the exact problems Williams has made its main focus to fix

This is what has driven the poaching of Piers Thynne from McLaren, where he essentially ran the factory and was responsible for manufacture, quality control and other functions pertaining to getting a frontrunning car built on time. It's understood that Thynne – whose father Sheridan was the commercial dynamo of Williams in the 1980s – has pushed for a substantial change to the planning, tracking and manufacturing process, including some of the systems recently adopted in place of the notorious Excel spreadsheet.

"It's not because we have individuals in design and manufacturing that weren't working incredibly hard," said Vowles. "That's one thing I have to say about everyone at Williams. I'm eternally thankful to them. They have given me seven days a week and 16 hours a day for what we have today in order for us to turn around.

"But we're working inefficiently, and we're working in a pretty poor way, frankly, in terms of how we should be for our future. And what Piers brings to that is stability, the right way of thinking, the right tools and systems that we should be integrating, the right planning that goes around it.

"And it's not just in operations, it's end-to-end from initial concept design in aero, all the way through design office, all the way through to production. That's one example.

"The second is that we had, when I joined, no [Enterprise Resource Planning] software. But we have software today that not all of it was actually helping. Some of it, I would say, was hindering and slowing down the factory. 

"And across this August break, we've pulled half of it out. If you speak to any team on the grid and say, ‘I'm going to modify your ERP system half way through the year,' they'd close their eyes because it's not a nice thing to do. We have to in order to get to where we need to be.

Vowles has led the drive to update the development tools at Williams

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images

"It's an example I spoke about just recently. And to give you an idea of the depth of the problems, some of our CAD systems were 15 years out of date. And so you can't update them in one go.

"You're just chunking through the whole business, finding areas that aren't at the right level, fix them. And with [the] cost cap especially, you can't do it all in one go. So you're just targeting and moving across. 

"But what it means is the amount of time it takes you, if you were in aerodynamics in my team or design in my team, to do your job is significantly longer than it would be anywhere else on the grid. And we've got to fix that because we're fighting with one arm tied behind our back."

Again and again

Enterprise Resource Planning software has become, to use a ghastly example of managementspeak, ‘mission critical' in the budget cap era since it allows teams to account for the cost of every component as well as factoring in its operating life, so spares and developments can be accounted for as well. But you might well argue that holding up the ERP as a reason for failure is essentially playing the same tune as blaming an Excel spreadsheet, or at least incorporating it into some sort of ‘greatest hits' medley. (Parenthetically speaking, this worked for the Quo on The Anniversary Waltz in 1990).

In the same media briefing, as well as later on during the official press conference, Vowles slipped another oft-heard number on the turntable, this being the challenge of modernising in a cost-capped environment when a team has suffered 20 years of underinvestment. This is a fair point since previous iterations of the Concorde Agreement, during Bernie Ecclestone's tenure as commercial rights holder, magnified the inequalities between teams because the revenue was split disproportionately among the frontrunners.

The recent woes of Aston Martin under Lawrence Stroll's ownership have demonstrated that such historic inequalities can't be solved by throwing money at them. But the problem team leaders such as Vowles (as well as the rotating cast of characters at Aston Martin) face is that the new generation of entrepreneurs buying into F1 aren't generally interested in hearing an encore of previous rationales for failure. F1's timescales don't tally with a mindset more accustomed to quarterly earnings calls.

Will Dorilton - not to mention Albon and Sainz - have the patience to wait for Williams to make its critical improvements?

Photo by: Michael Potts / LAT Images via Getty Images

"What I'm doing right now is putting a lot of cost cap dollars in fixing problems that other teams don't have," insisted Vowles. "It's not a surprise to me, it shouldn't be a surprise to any of you that the top four teams pull away from everyone else when you get a regulation change, because that stresses the system entirely.

"I think that you're seeing the negative side of the cost cap as well. You bulk in what's happened 20 years before that. We're not going to dig out every single problem that's happened in one year. It's just not going to happen. 

"We will, however, make sure every decision we're doing is the right one for our long-term success. If I made all the decisions that were right for next year, just to save myself or save a driver, it would mean you get a small spike [in performance] and then you go backwards again.

"Every decision we're making is the right decision for this team for the next five years, not for one year. And that may mean that we're not getting the success rate we want to across [20]27, but it will mean that across the next five years we're moving forward."

Eternally popular though Status Quo remain, only the hardcore completists will own every one of the 37 ‘Greatest Hits' compilation albums they've released since 1969. What appetite will Dorilton have over the next few years for hearing familiar chords, in a different order or not, emanating from the Williams factory?