Turning around an ailing F1 team is a hugely complex, expensive and drawn-out process – especially when ambitions are sky-high
JAKE BOXALL-LEGGE
FORMULA 1
entimentality is in short supply in modern Formula 1, and so it should be; a rich heritage is not a prerequisite of success, and neither does it guarantee that. Just ask the spectre of Lotus, or Brabham, or any of the other teams whose past glories eluded them when their coffers became conspicuously bare in the early 1990s. Williams was not far from enduring a similar fate just five years ago. The effect of underinvestment began to snowball: car development troubles rolled the team towards the rear of the field; sponsors began to flock to more successful teams; and the Grove squad had to look to drivers to fill the void in its precarious bank balance.
When Dorilton Capital acquired the team from the Williams family, it was tinged with bittersweetness. The team that Sir Frank Williams had built and taken to championship titles throughout the 1980s and 1990s was now enfranchised to do more than merely survive, but without the familial ties that had continued under daughter Claire’s stewardship of the team.
But it took time to shake off the survival mentality, hence the appointment of James Vowles as team principal last year. Progress under ex-VW motorsport chief Jost Capito had stalled in 2022, and the team slipped to the bottom of the order once again, prompting a change of management. Vowles, a pitwall mainstay during Mercedes’ period of dominance, had been tasked with steering the ship into more harmonious waters. It aligned with progress in 2023; like its predecessor, the FW45 was a particularly ‘peaky’ car and terrified its midfield rivals in the higher-speed circuits, yet was not entirely balanced across the board.
Vowles tasked the team with rectifying that for this year’s FW46, all under a new framework that aimed to eliminate contingency measures that would speed up the car build process at the expense of performance. Have the opening seven races been a fair reflection of that? Yes, but also no. The push to cut contingencies – the process of cannibalising older parts or building new ones from easier to produce, but heavier, materials – ultimately pushed back the completion date of the FW46, as anticipated. But the overall performance hoped for has not come to pass, and the team currently sits pointless
