How Vowles is changing the culture at the Williams F1 team

That’s the challenge Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry have taken on as they try to get the Grove outfit up to speed, on and off the track.

The team made decent progress last season during Vowles’s first year in the job, securing seventh place in the world constructors’ championship.

The FW45 was already built when he arrived, so this year’s car is the first designed and put together on his watch, meanwhile Fry only started work in November and therefore had limited input, so his initial focus was on finding out how the place operated and what areas needed to be improved.

For Vowles, the past winter was a learning exercise, and like Fry has previously detailed, he was alarmed at how late the FW46 came together.

“The chassis was a bag of bits in January,” Vowles said. “You can’t operate that way, it’s a level of stress that the organisation doesn’t need. Instead of focusing on performance, we’ve just been focusing on surviving, and getting the car to the track.

“That’s the cultural element of things. We have a car, and I’m proud we have a car, because it was a tremendous effort. It’s more throughput in a short period of time than I think every team on the grid, but we’ve done it ourselves, and it was structured, and process driven.

“I’m confident we can have something better. None of this is a complaint, it’s more that there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in our system to do better, and we have to, it’s our responsibility to make sure that this is the last winter and build that we go through like this. It cannot be that way again.”

Vowles had a first hint of problems ahead during 2023 when he watched updates on the FW45 coming through the system as they took longer to reach the track than he would have liked.

“Last year, when I came into the team, it was already 20 February, the car was already a physical entity,” he recalled. “What I was able to see was more the updates in the year, which is very lightweight compared to a build.

“A build is 20,000 bits coming together within two weeks. An update is occasionally a large update, but it’s a floor, front wing, rear wing, whatever it may be, and it’s more controlled. There were absolute signs of problems there, but not to the extent of the winter.”

Vowles knew when he moved across from his previous role at