How Williams resolved its first flashpoint with two top drivers
Formula 1

How Williams resolved its first flashpoint with two top drivers

by Edd Straw, Scott Mitchell-Malm
4 min read

Up Next

Williams team principal James Vowles has promised there will be no repeat of the miscommunication that led Carlos Sainz to think either Alex Albon or an engineer had disobeyed a team order in the previous Formula 1 race.

Although Williams scored its best result of the season in the Miami Grand Prix with Albon fifth on merit and Sainz also in the points in ninth, it also featured the team's first major flashpoint since having what Vowles has repeatedly described as two world-class drivers.

Sainz felt he was made to "feel stupid" in Miami after being told they would hold position with him ahead of Albon in the opening stint - only for Albon to overtake him very soon after.

Though Sainz's frustration was obvious in the moment and afterwards, Albon was adamant it was just a miscommunication.

He had only briefly been told to stay a second behind Sainz because of a water pressure issue that Williams was keen to manage, and was then allowed to "crack on" as Albon said he was about to overtake and would get cool air into his car that way.

Vowles, speaking at a media event in the week leading up to the next F1 race at Imola, said the situation got resolved "in about two minutes" when both Sainz and Albon were in his office on Sunday in Miami and said it was a result of Williams not doing a good enough job the first time it has "had to do serious team orders".

"Alex had a cooling issue, we needed some air in his radiator, and you can do that in two ways: you can overtake or you can drop back by over a second," said Vowles.

"Because the communication was nearly as long as that over the radio to engineers, there was now a discussion ongoing. Whereas one [engineer] went to the driver and said, 'Don't worry, Alex won't attack' the second one was still going through a debate of 'tell me what we need to do here and what we need to do there', because it was not clear.

"That's on us, we have to clear that up. For Carlos his frustration was he thought that Alex disobeyed orders or an engineer did. Neither of those happened.

"This is on us to make sure we fix on the pitwall. I can give you a guarantee it won't happen again with what we've changed."

James Vowles

Asked by The Race if he could elaborate on what would change to avoid a repeat, Vowles said: "Race engineers, actually for a lot of it, are parrots. So if you give them a long winded thing, they have to start thinking through and break it up.

"If you explain an instruction - 'do not overtake' - I guarantee you that will go to the cars and the cars won't overtake. That's not what we did.

"It was a long discussion of what was going wrong, what corner it was going wrong, and how to mitigate against it, with an instruction bedded in there.

"I let it all happen in real time. And then we had a discussion afterwards where we laid out a proper protocol for how to do it.

"It just needs to be short, concise, to the point with the right person communicating to the right people, in the right moment, that's it.

"It's not difficult. And as much as it sounds harsh, you have to be non-human about it. It's just got to be 'do this, do it now, we'll talk later'."

Vowles said the post-race conversation with the two drivers about what happened on-track morphed immediately into a 45-minute debrief about how to improve the car.  

Albon and Sainz have formed an effective partnership already at Williams, which is fifth in the constructors' championship and enjoying its best season in almost a decade.

So far, incumbent driver Albon has had the edge in terms of pace and points, but he has also been praised by Vowles and Sainz for how open and helpful he has been with his new team-mate.

Vowles reckons Sainz has benefited from the fact "Alex has no politics in him whatsoever at all", and that the dynamic of the two working together completely transparently to help the team is "different to what he was experiencing previously" - whereas Albon now has a top-level team-mate to get "benchmark data that you can work against, benchmark debriefing you can work against, and different ways of thinking about car philosophy that he's been able to explore a little bit more as a result of it".

Asked how significant this combination has been in the step Williams has made this season, Vowles said: "Reasonable. I can't put a weighting on it, because I like to do that.

"But you need two drivers…if you look up and down the grid, who are the ones really with two proper drivers? And I said this all the way through, we are fortunate to really have two world class drivers.

"It's not just about how they drive the car, it's how out of the car we are developing across the season.

"I'm confident we have added performance from the Bahrain test to where we are today. Some of it's in the front wing updates. A lot of it is just how we extract the performance of the package.

"And with two drivers, you can actually double up the amount of effort in your set-up direction, which has got us to where we are today.

"So all I can tell you is, with just one of those drivers, there's no way we would have been as fast as we were in Miami."

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More Networks