Williams has seen so many false dawns since the ’90s. It was a cottage industry team bolstered and patched as required to encompass whatever technology was needed to keep it at the front. Until the game got bigger, more sophisticated and teams became so big they needed to be managed like a small corporation. Williams wasn’t ready for that, didn’t adapt, had no succession plan and as the results faded so did the income and the downward spiral began.
Toto Wolff might have made it into something; he was there in time to pull it out of its steep dive but better opportunities came his way. As Frank Williams faded and Patrick Head retired Claire Williams enlisted Mike O’Driscoll to keep the whole thing financially afloat but the competitive trajectory was downwards notwithstanding a brief surge at the beginning of the hybrid era when the Mercedes engines it was using had such an advantage over Ferrari and Renault.
It was constantly fighting internal crises, departments competing against departments, people against rival people, old guard against clever but unseasoned graduates. And still the income dwindled, the facilities fell further behind. Until, as an organisation, it no longer even knew what it didn’t know. But in the Liberty F1 franchise era, it had very significant value. Which is what led to it being owned by private investment company Dorilton Capital.
Finance is no longer a key limitation. But Dorilton’s initial choice of team principal Jost Capito and the ex-VW technical and marketing team he brought with him didn’t work out. Legal claims and counterclaims around various firings are ongoing and the original Dorilton-appointed CEO, Darren Fultz, is no longer there.
Dorilton’s recruitment of James Vowles as team principal pre-season was an intriguing one. Highly regarded within Mercedes, where he was seen as a likely future team principal, he’s logical, calm and a great communicator. He’s had half a season now to understand where the team is at and, fresh from a top team, should have a full appreciation of where it’s lacking and what the order of priorities is in the rebuilding process. Having appointed ex-Ferrari and Alpine Pat Fry as chief technical officer, Vowles talked in Spa of how he saw things.
He’s big on team culture. Yes, the team is behind on some aspects of its infrastructure and Vowles is campaigning for Williams to have an exemption from cost cap limits on capital expenditure in order to replace equipment which in many cases is 20 years out of date. But putting that aside, culture change is where he sees the easy-hanging fruit.
“A strategy plays out over one or two years but culture is your powerhouse”
“You can have a strategy and that’s important,” he says, “but culture eats strategy for breakfast in importance. A strategy plays out over one or two years but culture is your powerhouse and it changes an organisation. I have to enact all the behaviours that I want my team to have. It’s their choice as to what the culture becomes. They create the culture. But you can enact it and you bring in leadership that has exactly the same properties. If you look at Williams, for many years they’ve been fearful of losing their jobs. So first and foremost, the messaging I’ve been putting out there is we’re in a strong place and we’re going to rebuild from where we are, giving people confidence that there’s a structure behind it. People can start thinking one, two, five years in front. When you start giving people that perception, they start to realise there’s a journey and you can stop worrying about the fire that’s in front of you and more about how we move forward. It doesn’t happen overnight. In my experience it takes about three years.”
He’s relating here to the sorry state the former BAR and Honda team was in before Ross Brawn and subsequently Toto Wolff arrived to change the culture, the foundation of the blockbusting success which followed. Vowles, on the staff at the team from its beginning as BAR, lived through that.
But he’s not falling into the trap of defining a precise timeline and cites the recent mass firings at Alpine as what can happen when expectations are not met. “It’s a misalignment of expectations which ends up in a reactive decision. The board are expecting one thing, the results are suggesting something else and there’s no way out. What’s important is the thing leading up to future results and buying into that, keeping those things aligned.”
The thorny problem of getting the bigger teams to allow Williams to overcome the years of underinvestment is ongoing, but even if Vowles succeeds, the time lag is a potential hazard in getting everyone to keep the faith.
“If we broke ground tomorrow, it’d be 36 months before the infrastructure is in place and that’s different to a lot of other teams that already have that. Your bare minimum you’re looking at is getting the infrastructure in place plus a period of time of learning with it and trying to catch up to your rivals that have been using it for 15 years. When we say five years, there’s good reason behind it.”
Is that just a buying-time excuse against future underperformance? It depends on the vision and ability of the person saying it. Because stability over time and through the inevitable periods of turbulence is absolutely fundamental in long-term success. Now that the finance is in place, is Vowles that person, the one who can guide Williams back to the light? Time will tell and that’s all he’s asking for.
Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark
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