Two years into the project of a lifetime, James Vowles is keeping his ultra-focused head above the parapet.
Hunched over a table in his team’s hospitality unit, the Williams team principal is reflecting on a 2024 season of underachievement. In 24 races, his team recorded more crashes than points: 20 to 17. To say it was an expensive, energy-sapping campaign would be an understatement.
Yet ultimately, it does not matter. Nor does the upcoming 2025 season, even with Ferrari race winner Carlos Sainz, a coup of an acquisition, joining the team to partner Alex Albon. Nearly all of Vowles’ attention is geared towards 2026; a year of new engine and chassis regulations and, as such, fresh opportunity at the front.
“I will not sacrifice the future for the now,” Vowles tells The Independent. And even now, he is laser-sharp in his philosophy, 10 days out from the first race of the season in Australia.
“Above all else, the most important year is 2026. It doesn’t matter where we finish in the championship in 2025. It’s not that I don’t care, I do care. But the on-track performance is not an indicator of the lovely things going on at Williams.
“And that’s not a pair of handcuffs we put on ourselves. We need to see excellence coming into our organisation: the best graduates, infrastructure, and continuous movement forward in all areas.
“That’s the metric I stand by which is tangible, and I can control that moving forward.”
The 45-year-old’s seeking of success stems from a career in which he has thrived at the very top of Formula One. Starting out with BAR (British American Racing) in 2001, the engineering graduate first rose to prominence as Brawn’s race strategist in 2009, guiding Jenson Button to the most fairytale of F1 title triumphs.
Vowles stayed with the same outfit as chief strategist as they morphed into the Mercedes juggernaut of the 2010s hybrid era; a team which won eight straight constructors’ championships and seven drivers’ titles.
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Six of those were won by Lewis Hamilton; a driver Vowles still takes inspiration from to this day. “Lewis reinvented himself every winter,” he explains. “Whether it be diet, training, lifestyle, his approach to data and video, he was prepared to rip it up and start again.
“What I learned from Lewis is this culture of ‘if you keep winning, keep changing – in fact, change more.’
“If you stay still, you fall back and he taught me that, in spades.”
JAMES VOWLES - F1 CAREER
2001-2009: BAR/Honda/Brawn – Chief Strategist
2010-2022: Mercedes – Chief Strategist/Motorsport Strategy Director
2023-current: Williams – Team Principal
Vowles pontificates about his vision for Williams in an astute and precise manner. In almost every answer, he states the significance of “culture” within a team. Every second in his company feels like a lesson in the pursuit of organisational excellence, with terminology seeming to emanate straight out of Jake Humphrey’s High Performance Podcast. Yes, Vowles was a guest last year.
Yet it is easy to see why Sainz – in the peak of his career – turned down offers from Alpine and Audi to join Vowles’ ambitious approach for the future. The team boss has thrived in an environment of sporting supremacy – and he wants to awaken a sleeping giant in the second coming of the behemoth built by Sir Frank Williams nearly 50 years ago.
“Don’t settle for what you’ve done today – keep breaking it and evolving it,” Vowles says, when asked what he can take from his dozen years at Mercedes and instil at Williams.
“We can have failure in the pursuit of more performance, whereas failure because you haven’t followed due process is a problem. But if we look at a problem and try something, that’s celebrated because that’s how you have innovation.
“I don’t need to manage Carlos’s expectations. He’s coming here because he wants to make Williams successful and be a key driver towards it. That’s what I love about him – he’s part of the future.”
Last summer, Vowles hired 26 technical staff from rival teams, including Alpine’s former technical director Matt Harman. A year earlier, he signed highly respected engineer Pat Fry as chief technical officer. He has had to make tough calls already, ditching Logan Sargeant in the middle of last season for Franco Colapinto, who impressed and has now moved onto Alpine with no room at the inn.
But Williams now have one of the strongest driver line-ups on the grid and sound financial backing, having signed a lucrative agreement with Australian software company Atlassian in the off-season. All the wheels are in motion.
However, they are not the only midfield team targeting 2026; Aston Martin, with the arrival of Adrian Newey, want to be a championship contender too, alongside the current frontrunners. Yet Vowles insists Williams’s forward-planning is “extreme” – their power unit is in place with Mercedes and his insistence on sacrificing three years of competition is persuasive. He will do it his way.
“I’m hyper-competitive, that comes across clearly,” he says. “And I’m surrounded by 1,000 hyper-competitive people, so it feels like a family to me.”
With partner Rachel, an NHS surgeon, and a young daughter at home in Oxford, Vowles’ home life briefly appears on the new series of Drive to Survive. His forensic and amusing attitude when it comes to caffeine intake was a hit on the last series, so much so that he was the focus of a joke from host Jack Whitehall at F1 75 Live in London last month. But the fanfare is not why he does it.
“I have the opportunity to bring back the sport’s second-most successful team with the right investment,” he signs off. “How many people have that opportunity up and down the pit lane?
“That’s why I do it. We’re not out of the woods yet, there’s still a tremendous amount to do in the next two years. But the good news is I can now see light at the end of the tunnel.”
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