Williams plan may see F1 team get worse, but boss James Vowles is okay with that
Most bosses would be concerned at the thought of their team scoring fewer points. James Vowles is not like most bosses.
The 44-year-old is six months into his role as Williams team principal – the first time he has held that title in Formula 1. But he is no stranger to this world, having spent the majority of his adult working life in the sport since starting at BAR in 2001.
Vowles remained with that team through all its transitions, to Honda, to Brawn GP and then to Mercedes where he became a potential successor to Toto Wolff. Instead, he chose to leave at the start of this year to take over at Williams.
He is honoured and privileged to take responsibility for such an iconic British brand, but his task is unenviable. Long gone are the glory days of Sir Frank's team, of Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Damon Hill at the peak of their powers in the '90s.
Vowles inherited a team running around at the back of the grid, with infrastructure 20 years out of date and a to-do list several miles long. And with so much to overhaul and years of mismanagement to rectify, Vowles admits things need to be broken before they can be properly fixed.
Sebastian Vettel warns of looming F1 ban and is "very worried about the future"
That means there likely won't be a great deal to cheer about for a few years yet. "The decision was made a long time ago that I'm not interested in '23 and I’m not interested in ‘24 either, for that matter," Vowles, a thoughtful and engaging interviewee, told Mirror Sport with uncharacteristic bluntness.
"We'll make a step, but I'm interested in putting in place the mechanisms and the systems that allow us to be performant by 2026. You simply can't run on the treadmill as quickly in the current years and still do the following years.
Vowles joined Williams from Mercedes where he enjoyed tremendous success as Lewis Hamilton dominated F1 (Getty Images)"You've got to put more focus on the future than you do on today, which is not the same as what can be applied to pretty much most other teams on this grid. I'm comfortable with that.
"We could be speaking here in a year's time and you might have seen the team move backwards a little bit. That's okay – that's not what I'm interested in. What I am interested in is putting the systems and structures in that go further. You have to break a few things before that happens."
Williams is owned these days by American investment firm Dorilton Capital. While the F1 boom has certainly seen a rise in value since it bought the team, more years of running around at the back of the grid is unlikely to excited those at the top – and Vowles knows that.
Vowles' long-term goal is to restore Williams to its former F1 glory (Getty Images)"It's hard to do this with a board, by the way, to accept the short-term pain for long-term success," he said with a smirk. But the success he does want to deliver is on an ambitious level to say the least.
He continued: "I'm not interested in fighting for eighth, seventh, sixth, whatever it may be. I'm interested in... the proper step will be, you're fourth. When the world recognises you're fourth, proper steps are [then that] you've done something that breaks you into the top three. Those are the two major milestones.
"When you talk about it that way, it somewhat makes sense that you don't care about the minutiae and the detail of whether you're seventh, eighth or ninth. That's the truth of where we are today. It looks good on paper, being seventh, and I'm proud of it – the team has done a great job. But that's not where I want to be, for myself or for them."
He pointed out the green shoots he has already spotted even in his short time at the helm: "I think there's real, genuine, tangible progress. We have a long way to go, we're nowhere near the front at the moment, but it's the journey that, if you look at the direction of travel, is the right one."
Six months have now passed since Vowles officially began in the role and, by his own admission, it will take several more years before the fruits of his labours begin – he hopes – to become obvious. Whether or not he might have inherited that top job at Mercedes, had he stayed, we will never know.
Mick Schumacher free to race for McLaren in 2023 after Mercedes deal reached
But there will be no wondering what might have been for a man far too excited and far too busy to be wasting time and energy doing that. Vowles said with a broad smile: "I'm comfortable and it feels like home.
"You make some decisions in life and you go, 'That was a good decision' or, 'That was a bad decision'. But this was, I think, the best decision I've made career-wise in the 20-odd years I've been doing this.
"The reason: It feels natural. In Formula 1 there's not a day where you're ever watching the clock, but it's not even that. There's not a day where I don't walk away with a smile on my face. That's six months in – normally that disappears, but it hasn't.
"I think it will only grow as this team grows over the next few years as well. That's what I'm excited about more than anything else. A lot of the time you're looking back and reflecting on that being the positive, but I'm not. The future is the positive bit and this is the start of the journey."
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
