Vowles on what Williams has done wrong: too much change

Williams team principal James Vowles has admitted that his approach to restructuring the Grove-based outfit always risked being detrimental in the short term.

The former strategy director of Mercedes joined Williams two years ago, with some of the infrastructure famously described as dating back to the “Ming Dynasty” and an Excel spreadsheet used to track all car parts, partly due to a lack of budget under the Williams family in the 2010s.

While Vowles has been striving to revamp the team, he revealed some of the attempted progress was more than the squad could chew, describing “a reflection of good choices and bad choices” in an end-of-season interview with Motorsport.com.

“We have to change a lot within our organisation in terms of infrastructure and technology to get us to the right place,” Vowles continued.

“And there’s a sign called change saturation. You can change things at a certain rate. You go too far and you break it – in hindsight, moving things a little bit further than we can really deal with in one go.

“But we won’t undo that learning. That learning will stay with us now for the rest of time. So it’s a positive, just damaged by a negative. And what I’m saying by that is, yep, that’s absolutely spot-on.

“But we didn’t get it all right, which is why we’re not fighting for those positions. That’s a reflection of where we are as a team and where I want us to be as a team.”

This assessment is in line with the approach Vowles advocated for when designing and manufacturing last year’s Williams FW46, as he said early in 2024: “I wanted to stress the system to the absolute limit to understand where it’s breaking, and how it’s breaking – once. It’s the only winter we’re going to do it.”

There was a lot of breaking for Williams in the 2024 Formula 1 season – both literally and metaphorically, with numerous crashes and other flaws – but that’s a price Vowles was ready to pay in order to get ready for the new technical era from 2026.

Asked if this was short-term pain for long-term gains, Vowles replied: “I would say that’s a good view of it, and I knew it would be.

“I always said from the beginning, before we started the year, we were going to sacrifice 2024 and 2025. This is a little bit what the sacrifice looks like, just with a lot more attrition than I expected.”

The damaged car of Logan Sargeant, Williams FW46, arrives on the back of a truck in the pit lane

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

The Briton insisted he had full support from team owner Dorilton Capital regarding his approach: “It was part of the agreement from the get-go when I joined, which is no one, neither side, wants any short-term fixes. Everything is doing right for the future.

“Nothing should be a sticky plaster. Sticky plasters look good, create a veneer, and then it falls over pretty quickly. It could be a year, it could be three years, but it falls over. Do this right that we’re building a team that is successful for many years to come. So in answer to that, it’s mutual buy-in for us.”

Vowles did admit to having more pressure for 2026 with the upcoming season being somewhat written off, but clarified that pressure was largely his own.

“What we already know internally is ‘26 isn’t going to be the be-all and end-all,” he added. “It will just be a positive step in the right direction. ‘27, ‘28 should be steps above that.

“And really, from ‘25 onwards, we’re just starting to see the fruits of the labour that we’ve been getting, in the last few years, delivered.

“As soon as you go and pick one year and say ‘this is going to be it’, you create probably the wrong environment. Every year should be a build from the previous one.”