New team principal James Vowles has a big challenge to produce a competitive Williams car for 2023. Photo / Don Kennedy
New team principal James Vowles has a big challenge to produce a competitive Williams car for 2023. Photo / Don Kennedy
There is almost an element of impatience as F1 gears up for a new season, and yet already there are media discussions about 2024, in the light of the Andretti family’s quest to enter F1, and Lewis Hamilton being out of contract at the end of this season.
Defending Constructors’ champions Red Bull are not hanging about in their quest to give world champion Max Verstappen a third consecutive title, whilst repeating as constructor’s champions. The team has announced it will be the first team to reveal its new car on February 3, ahead of the Williams team, who will reveal their new racer on February 6.
The latter will have a new team principal after parting ways with Jost Capito. The new man at the helm will be former Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles. The 43-year-old British motorsport engineer began his F1 career with British American Racing and then moved on to the Brawn team, owned and led by Ross Brawn, which in 2009 shocked the F1 world by giving Jenson Button a championship-winning car. Brawn had previously been partly responsible for Ferrari’s dominance between 2000 and 2004, before moving on to Honda.
Brawn acquired the former Honda F1 team when Honda decided to pull out of F1 at the end of 2008, but instead of continuing with a Honda engine, Brawn switched to Mercedes engines. The car had an unusual double diffuser, but proved a winner, as the team won eight out of 17 grand prix to become world champions.
Vowles played a key role in that 2009 season and stayed at Mercedes, with whom he would be part of a history-making eight consecutive Constructor’s titles, as well as giving Hamilton six title-winning cars and Nico Rosberg one. Despite that successful association, Vowles is very happy to become a team principal and has the backing of Wolff and Hamilton.
Lewis Hamilton is unlikely to wave goodbye to F1 at the end of this season. Photo / Don Kennedy
“I cannot wait to start with Williams,” Vowles said. “It’s an honour to join a team with such an incredibly rich heritage. The team is an icon of our sport, one I greatly respect, and I am very much looking forward to the challenge.
“Williams Racing have placed their faith and trust in me, and I will do the same in return. The team has tremendous potential, and our journey together starts in a matter of weeks.”
It will be quite a challenge, because despite having won the Constructor’s championship nine times, and winning the driver’s championship seven times, Williams hasn’t tasted championship success since 1997. The team was last in 2020, improved to eighth in 2021, but was last again in 2022.
“Mercedes have been hugely supportive on my journey, and we part on excellent terms after 20 years of working in Brackley,” Vowles added.
Wolff confirmed he had called Hamilton to tell him about Vowles moving to Williams.
“I told him this week that this was going to happen and he is absolutely fine,” Wolff said.
“Working with James has always been a great pleasure for him. The clever thinking on a Sunday morning was good fun with James always. I think his [Lewis’] first response was ‘That’s amazing for James’.”
Vowles confirmed he had also phoned Hamilton and said his response was “not insulting or telling me he’s disappointed, it was quite the opposite”.
Vowles has also made it clear that he is not going to morph the Williams team into a “mini-Mercedes”.
“I wouldn’t consider it a mini-Mercedes. Williams is an incredibly independent team in its own right, which has formed its own history, its own heritage.
“It doesn’t mean that Mercedes and ourselves won’t have collaboration in some form or another, there was collaboration before I joined, but I have to do what is best for Williams from here onwards.”
Given Williams only scored eight points last season, Wolff is unlikely to be kept awake wondering what his former chief strategist might be able to do with Williams this year. And judging by a recent comment, Wolff is not concerned that Hamilton’s contract with Mercedes expires at the end of this year.
“We have a full year to go, we’re so aligned,” Wolff says. “In the last 10 years our relationship has grown that it’s just a matter of him physically being back in Europe, sticking our heads together, wrestling a bit and then leaving the room with white smoke after a few hours.”
While Wolff is relatively happy about Vowles’ departure and confident about Hamilton extending his Mercedes contract for a few more years, he is not so positive about the news of the Andretti family entering a new team in F1 in 2024. Wolff is on record as stating that his team, and the other nine teams, would suffer financially having an 11th team on the grid.
Andretti says they will be able to unlock the American market if allowed to join the grid in 2024, even though there are now three US races this year, leading Wolff to question what value an Andretti team might bring to F1. He is perhaps forgetting that Andretti is the biggest name in US motorsport, and an Andretti F1 team would increase US interest in F1 on top of having races in Austin, Texas, Miami, which had its inaugural race last year, and the addition this year of a race in Las Vegas.
The Andretti bid will undoubtedly gain momentum from the announcement that it has formed a partnership with General Motors and its Cadillac brand. Even Wolff had to accept that joining forces with Cadillac and GM was making “a statement”.
“Nobody would ever question GM’s or Cadillac’s pedigree in motorsport, and as a global auto company,” Wolff acknowledged.
But while he still won’t give the bid his team’s support, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem appears to be agreeable to it, according to Michael Andretti.
“In the end, it is still an FIA series and the president has definitely shown that he really would like to have an 11th team on the grid,” Michael said.
“He is a racer and he understands the importance of that for the series itself. So, we feel confident that once the expression of interest goes out, especially having a great partner like Cadillac as we have, we have a very good shot at checking every box and being on the grid very soon.”
Wolff may also have forgotten that the Brawn team only entered F1 for one season, but it morphed into the extremely successful team that became Mercedes, a team Wolff still heads, with the hope it can win the championship again, Along with Ferrari, it is one of the teams favoured to prevent Red Bull winning again.
The FIA has a say in what teams may compete in F1, but race venues are chosen by the Formula One group, who own F1. The FIA role in track venues is solely from a safety point of view by ensuring the tracks have the grade 1 licence. Notwithstanding this, Ben Sulayem has stated that despite the percentage of race venues in Europe falling to 44 per cent from 63 per cent in 2003, the concern that circuits like Spa and Monaco may disappear from the calendar may not happen.
“Even if there are other regions in the world that are becoming more attractive, we must not leave one thing: Europe,” Sulayem says.
“Everything started there. I believe that you cannot remove everything from Europe at the same time. But where do you draw the line? At the end of the day the promoter is building a business and we need to look at what we need to do to keep motorsport alive. But water only flows downstream, not upstream and we need governments to back us up.”
They say sport and politics shouldn’t mix, but to most people involved in F1, it is more a business, than it is a sport. The reason someone like Toto Wolff opposes the greatest name in American racing entering F1 is because it might affect his team’s share of the profits. He is not thinking about the sporting spectacle of having another team on the grid.
For race fans, they want to see the Aston Martin AMR23 or the Alpine A523 taking it to the Mercedes F1W14. Probably won’t happen, but just like Vowles has great hope of turning around the fortunes of a formerly highly successful team like Williams, so will the other six teams not currently enjoying success want to turn the clock back and compete at the front. Alpine won a race in 2021, as did McLaren, but last year Red Bull dominated with 17 wins, while Ferrari had four and Mercedes just one. More different teams winning is the dream of most race fans and last year the midfield cars were closer to the front than they have ever been, so the hope is that trend will continue.
So too does the FIA, which brought in regulatory changes last year to close the competitive gap, while enforcing a budget cap. The build-up to the quest to stop Verstappen from running away with another title is well under way.
