Just one week on from the final round of the Formula One season in Abu Dhabi, and Mercedes’ chief strategist James Vowles was back at a race track. As if his day job of chasing on-track performance around the globe for 22 weekends a year wasn’t enough, Vowles took the earliest opportunity after the end of the season to book himself on what he calls “a weird holiday” in the south of France. The destination was the familiar home of the French Grand Prix, Circuit Paul Ricard, but the big difference on this visit was that he was behind the wheel.
In his role at Mercedes, Vowles is the voice of calm across the team’s internal radio communications during a race weekend. Very occasionally, usually if things don’t go to plan, you’ll hear him talk directly to either Lewis Hamilton or George Russell, but the vast majority of his commands remain on internal comms among Mercedes’ engineers as he oversees the strategy of both cars on track.
Although he’s modest about his role in the team, those calls, and the calmness with which they are delivered, have contributed to a total of 114 race victories for Mercedes in the last decade.
But with his role reversed from pit wall to cockpit at Paul Ricard last week, his voice wasn’t quite so calm as he approached the terrifyingly fast Signes corner in a Lamborghini GT3 car. The pit-to-car radio remained firmly closed as he prepared himself for the 160mph leap of faith, but he had a big grin on his face as he relayed the story later in the evening via Zoom.
“I had to really psych myself up by shouting at myself as I went through Signes,” he said. “I don’t have any idea if anyone else in the driving world does that, but I needed to properly psych myself up to go through it at that speed.
“For the record, I don’t think our F1 drivers do that.”
Driving at 160 mph through a fast sweeping right-hander may not seem like an obvious way to unwind after a long F1 season, but Vowles has become addicted to that feeling and a large part of his winter break will be dedicated to replicating it. He raced in the Asian Le Mans Series double header in Dubai and Abu Dhabi at the start of 2022 and plans to do the same in early 2023 if he can close a deal over the coming weeks with one of the teams interested in putting him in their pro-amateur driver line-ups. Like so many that have been bitten by the motorsport bug, including his team boss Toto Wolff who spent his twenties and thirties pursuing a racing career in GT cars, Vowles now wants to see…
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