Williams Racing Principal James Vowles on 2025 F1 Season, Carlos Sainz

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The stars of Formula 1 were front and center during the recent F1 75 Live event in London, as the ten storied racing teams unveiled their cars and lineups for the 76th running of the Formula 1 World Championship. 

Among the teams in attendance was Williams Racing, one of the sport’s most prominent franchises, with a history that dates back almost five decades to when Frank Williams founded the team in 1977. For years, Williams was consistently one of the top teams in the series, taking home seven Drivers’ Championships during a run in the Eighties and Nineties, while fielding household names like Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet. But success has been hard to come by since then, and Williams hasn’t had an F1 champ since the Canadian, Jacques Villeneuve, claimed the title over the great Michael Schumacher in 1997. Two years ahead of the team’s 50th anniversary, Williams is setting the stage for its comeback and turning to a highly-accomplished face to take the proverbial driver’s seat.

When James Vowles was announced as Williams Racing’s new Team Principal in 2023, the news brought a strange wash of optimism that hadn’t been felt around the Williams paddock in years. The British-born engineer was coming off a successful run as chief strategist at Mercedes, where he led the team to eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships and seven drivers’ titles. Prior to that, Vowles had helped Brown GP secure both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships in the team’s memorable one-and-done 2009 season. Vowles has overseen more than 120 race victories in his Formula 1 career, and Williams was no doubt hoping that his record of achievements would shift the struggling team back into top gear.

Two seasons in, Williams is still searching for a podium finish, but Vowles insists that success is imminent, pointing to the continued consistency of fourth-year driver Alex Albon, and the addition of former Ferrari star Carlos Sainz to the fold for 2025. All he’s asking, is for fans to give him — and the team — a chance.

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“What I love about the sport is that we have Williams fans everywhere,” Vowles told Rolling Stone during a recent Zoom interview from London. “There’s a statistic that everyone’s second favorite team is Williams, and there are a lot of [fans who consider us] first favourites. But effectively, people want us to be successful and want us to do well.”

Here, the Williams Team Principal reflects on a challenging 2024 season and looks ahead to what he hopes will be a year of new beginnings and new heights.

How are you feeling after last year’s results?

The season was mixed. We had over 20 accidents in 24 Grand Prix [races], which is an extraordinarily high number. For comparison, I would have expected sort of two large accidents — that’s a normal season. You can see some teams got away with none. That hurt us, you know, at the point where you’re very desperately just trying to get your stock up to speed, getting your updates sorted. We were actually just trying to dig through bits of carbon and find out what we can and can’t use for following races, and that’s a tough situation to put yourself in, and it’s hard to drag the momentum forward when you’re being pushed backwards as a result.

Were there any positives to take away from the season?

We’re about nearly half a second down, relative to our rivals, but we are closing the gap. The positive is we put some large updates on the car, happened around [the Dutch Grand Prix in] Zandvoort, and that car has had the capability of being in the top ten really for most of the races since then. It’s good to see that we’re still able to develop the car, that we can move forward on what is a very tight grid — half a second, I think, separated all the cars near the end in Abu Dhabi.

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I don’t feel the on-track performance is a fair reflection of the amount of change that’s going on behind the scenes and when people comment on the positives of Williams, I think they can see that we are transforming the organization from the ground up: people, culture, infrastructure, technology, commercial, all of them. We dug up and rebuilt, and the signs of that are already present today.

There was so much hype around Logan Sargeant, when he joined Williams in 2023, but he was replaced by Franco Colapinto midway through last season. Why don’t you think it worked out with him?

First and foremost, I think I hope everyone can agree: we gave Logan a fair shot of it. We gave him the time required to grow and we gave him the support required to grow as well. At the same time, I think from that perspective, it’s a hard world out there. You’re in a very competitive environment, and you know, he was only a few tenths off, which is not a lot — it’s a blink of the eye — but in our world, that’s too much of a differentiation to be able to be competitive in a field that, as I said, is being separated by half a second now. So Logan reached the capability that he had in him. And it was a good level, but it’s not an excellent level, which is where we need to be operating in our sport. He did some really good work with himself, making sure he explored what he needed to be doing to get better and better every weekend, but like I said, everyone reaches a limit at some point.

You announced Carlos Sainz as the new Williams driver quite early on last season. Do you think that gave you an advantage, in terms of preparing for his arrival?

I definitely have had time to think about Carlos. Ferrari was very kind to us too, as they allowed us to run Carlos in Abu Dhabi, which was a very valuable test for ourselves to improve going forward in the year. So the build-up to that is obviously we had various discussions on Carlos, and how do we get the most out of him? For us, it was incredibly important to complete that test, as it allowed us to have the strength to understand over the winter, to say, ‘Hey, where else can we improve?’

How competitive do you think Williams can be this year?

We had a run where without question we didn’t have the investment we needed to be competing at the front, but the world’s changed and we’re now in a situation where we have absolutely got the right investment. We’ve got the right drive and we’re here to win multiple World Championships and if this year has shown you anything, it’s McLaren, a team that was to a certain extent, laughed at two years ago has won the World Championship. It’s a beacon and it’s an aspiration, but it’s the path that we’re on as well.

Some Team Principals prefer to stay behind the scenes, but you’re always speaking to the press and on social media addressing the fans after every race. Is that difficult for you to do, especially after tough results?

There’s only once this year that I think I was hurting, and that was in Brazil (eds note: both Colapinto and Albon crashed in qualifying, with the latter unable to start the race due to the damage sustained to his car; Colapinto’s car was repaired in time for lights out, but he subsequently brought out the red flag after crashing on lap 32)

That was hard. The car was quick and we walked away with nothing. I saw a lot of individuals that went through a lot of emotional turmoil that day. That’s the only time where I’ve just been there a little bit sat down in my chair, just needing a minute to myself. Other than that, no [it’s not difficult] and here’s why: it’s because the now is not what drives me. What drives me is the future success, where I can see the direction and how we can achieve it. So if you’re driven by that, you won’t be brought down by today.

You sort of alluded to the crew and the team behind Williams. Tell us about how you all work together.

Well there’s a lot more than just two drivers going around on a track. It’s not actually just two people, or even maybe the ten people you see on TV. But it’s 1,000 human beings working longer hours than you can ever possibly imagine, every single day of their life, because they want this team to be successful beyond anything else.

[The show] Drive to Survive created an environment where the world went, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’ But it’s a drive of 1,000 people pointing the right way towards one goal, and that’s what Formula 1 is to me, and it dragged me in nearly 30 years ago and I’ve never looked back.

What do you attribute the growth of the sport to?

With 1.5 billion viewers worldwide, Formula 1 growing formula is brilliant: it’s a spectacle; it’s a show; it’s a sport; it’s entertainment; it’s got drama; it’s got everything that you could want to get attracted to it.

How much of your role goes beyond the race itself and into marketing and promoting the Williams Racing brand?

My job is to lead this organization to go forward and win. But my job is also to make sure that we are pushing this brand Williams forward in the way that I believe it should be, which is a hugely successful entity. We are still the second most-successful team on the grid today, with nine World Championships; [we are] an entity that should be back at the front and deserves to be back at the front, but needs the investment to go there, and my job as a part of that is talking to the world and going, ‘Listen, if you want to follow Formula 1, great, because I think the sport is fantastic, but if you want to follow Williams, even better, because it’s got such a load of heritage and it will be the biggest sports transformation taking place over the next few years.

Those are bold words.

I think this will be one of the biggest sports transformations that has ever taken place. This is a team that had so much success previously and so many teams in the grid don’t have that. McLaren does, and Ferrari does, for transparency, but many others don’t. We have a legacy of nine World Championships, seven Drivers’ Championships, we have some of the best drivers to ever grace the world that have been a part of us — Nigel Mansell and Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Jenson Button — as well as world champion after world champion after world champion. That is what Williams stands for.