Seventh “is not success” for Williams

In brief

Seventh “is not success” for Williams, insists Vowles

Williams team principal James Vowles says that taking seventh place in the constructors’ championship does not constitute ‘success’ for his team.

Vowles joined Williams last year and led them to seventh in the standings, their best finish to a season since 2017. Speaking on the High Performance Podcast, Vowles says he’s wary of the team getting too happy with their results.

“When there’s a taste of success, you want to hold on to what you’ve got,” he said. “But putting that into a little bit of context, we scored as many points as a top team would score in one weekend.

“It was a success by the measure of where we were, but it’s not success. I don’t want that for this team. I don’t want that for the future of this team. I want more than that.”

Hunter-Reay and Daly get Indy 500 seats

Ryan Hunter-Reay and Conor Daly will both compete in this year’s Indianapolis 500 with Dreyer and Reinbold.

Hunter-Reay, who won the famous race back in 2014, will compete in his 16th Indy 500 this year, while Daly will race for the 11th time in the showpiece event, looking to improve on his best finish of sixth in 2022.

Lego launching new F1 sets

Lego will launch a series of racing car sets, including the McLaren MP4-4, the 2023 McLaren MCL60 and the 2023 Mercedes W14.

Released in the Speed Champions range, the W14 model features a ‘working V6 engine’ and comes in a 1:8 scale.

Links

Motor racing links of interest:

Mike Krack on how to build a hyper-focused team (Aston Martin)

‘Teams of between 500 and 800 people laboured in isolation to produce 10 different prototype cars, and across 5.412km of desert track, the performance gap was 0.7 per cent. Go to the corresponding qualifying session at the very end of the season, and the gap between fastest and slowest is still 0.7 per cent – but between two different teams. These margins are so very small that anything less than perfection leaves you walking away from a racetrack with less than you hoped to achieve.’

Online abuse puts sports at risk of losing stars – UAOA survey finds (FIA)

‘Among the headline findings of the survey, undertaken by the United Against Online abuse campaign, was a concern among the 22 sporting federations and NGOs which participated that abuse…