Williams boss James Vowles has admitted he wanted to stress the team’s infrastructure to the point of “breaking” ahead of the 2024 Formula 1 season.
The offseason ahead of the 2024 campaign was Vowles’ first at Williams, having joined as Team Principal on the eve of the 2023 season with that year’s car already developed.
Upon developing 2024’s FW46, Vowles was met with an antiquated design and manufacturing process that he and Chief Technical Officer Pat Fry sought to rip up.
With the shocking revelation that Williams used an Excel spreadsheet to track car parts, Vowles and Fry sought to revolutionise the team’s production processes.
That ambition led to a delayed and stressful car production process ahead of the 2024 season, which Vowles wishes to avoid repeating in the upcoming campaigns.
“We have to change a lot within our organisation in terms of infrastructure and technology to get us to the right place,” Vowles revealed to Autosport.
“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.”
Indeed, Williams entered the 2024 campaign with an overweight car and spent months rectifying that issue.
“But we won’t undo that learning,” Volwes added.
“That learning will stay with us now for the rest of time.
“So it’s a positive, just damaged by a negative.
“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.”
Williams sacrificing 2024 and 2025
Williams finished 2024 with a tally of 17 points, 11 less than in 2023 and slid down from seventh to ninth in the Constructors’ Championship.
That was in part due to the change in the manufacturing process and a switch in car philosophy that Williams committed to with the FW46.
Vowles isn’t expecting much more progress in 2025, though, with his mantra being to go all-in on the impending regulation reset arriving in 2026.
“I always said from the beginning, before we started the year, we were going to sacrifice 2024 and 2025,” he explained.
Exacipating Williams issues in 2024 was a series of high-speed, high-dame crashes throughout the season.
“This is a little bit what the sacrifice looks like, just with a lot more attrition than I expected,” Vowles admitted.
Williams owners have backed Vowles’ strategy
Williams is playing the long game with Vowles and pinning hopes on success with the extensive regulation overhaul.
In doing so, the team has effectively written off having a successful campaign this year.
Vowles revealed that Williams’ owners, Dorilton, are fully aligned with his strategy for success.
“It was part of the agreement from the get-go when I joined, which is no one, neither side, wants any short-term fixes,” he said.
“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.”
Despite pinning a lot of the team’s hopes on 2026, Vowles isn’t putting all his eggs in that basket.
There is an understanding that 2026 needs to be “a positive step” to bigger and better things in the following years, all with an eye to winning races and titles.
“What we already know internally is ‘26 isn’t going to be the be-all and end-all,” he said.
“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,” he concluded.
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