Williams building from the ground up with long-term F1 plan for success

Team principal James Vowles is unequivocal when discussing the long-term ambitions to take Williams back to the front of Formula 1 – and has no issues in admitting it is not a quick fix.

Having finished seventh in the constructors’ championship last season, Williams currently occupy eighth in the 2024 standings although the recent double points finish for Alex Albon and Franco Colapinto in Azerbaijan has improved the outlook.

Recent results are a far cry from the halcyon days of the 1980s and 90s during which time Williams won nine constructors’ titles and seven drivers’ championships.

Vowles, who has championship-winning experience working at Brawn and Mercedes before getting the top job at Williams, is committed to returning the team to the glory years and revealed at an Autosport Business event at Soho House in Austin that the whole team is aligned when it comes to the long-term nature of the plan required.

“We have to accept that ’24 and ’25 are just simply stepping stones in our pathway, but they’re not the key years,” he told Autosport editor-in-chief Rebecca Clancy during a panel.

“They’re years where we’ll deliver slight performance updates. We’ll move forward. I think we’ve demonstrated that enough. But let’s invest everything into our future and that’s 2026 where near enough every single rule has changed, not a line in it carrying over from ’24 or ’25, not a piece of the car will carry over.

“It is completely start again, clean sheet of paper and for a team like us, it means that I’ve already got a huge number of the organisation working on 2026. It’s a year and a half away. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve been designing the ’26 car for about six months now. The best aerodynamicists working on ’26, they’re not working on ’24 or ’25.”

Asked if Dorilton Capital, the investment firm that purchased Williams in 2020, and the team’s wealth of partners were on board with the potential loss of earnings through performance in 2024 and 2025 with attention turned to the new era beginning in 2026, Vowles replied: “Without a doubt.

“In the first conversations I had when I was joining Williams, I laid out a pathway and a cost and what was relayed back to me was: ‘Don’t shortcut anything. Let’s get this right, because we get it right once’.

“It…