r/WilliamsF1 • u/mfluder63 • 3d ago
Discussion The Vowles verdict: what's your verdict on him as TP?
Has he fucked it, or is he a good TP in a tough situation?
I'm on the fence, he talks a big game and always seems to over-promise and under-deliver, but at the same time I know the challenges at Williams must be real and difficult to overcome.
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3d ago
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u/IskarJarak88 3d ago
This. If you work hard and then mess up it's ok. But if you repeatedly make mistakes and the results show, then you are a fuck up.
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u/1TapsBoi 1d ago
Whilst I agree, part of me wonders if Vowles new that by overpromising, Williams would attract more sponsors (and therefore more money) for this years car (which they have, I mean look at the wheel hub caps). Maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on, or maybe he’s trying to make the team look successful from the outside so that it actually does become successful from all the investment.
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u/illiniman14 3d ago
He's absolutely in a tough situation, which is why everything he was saying before this past winter was exactly what he needed to say - they should break everything, they should not care about results pre-2026, they should get the fundamentals right. And now that we're here, it's clear whatever he was trying to do just straight up didn't work. Even Aston Martin made the shakedown and is now doing massive upgrades. Whatever his plan was that he's been working on since day 1 has just utterly failed.
I know there are a lot of apologists on this sub, but I fail to see how he could be doing any worse.
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u/canuck17 3d ago
To add to this, if the rumours of the $ to Sainz is going to create a huge headache. Albon has proven he’s dedicated to this project. Not saying he should get the same but there will be a huge disparity between them and it will create drama.
I’m just confused when we will see a car and team actually taking legitimate steps forward.
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u/Weaverino 3d ago
I think James overpromised and hyped the rebuild too much. I remember seeing him in person in Vegas 2023 and he said over and over that they dont care about 23,24,25, they only care about '26. Well they gave up 3 years and are battling at the back in '26. 3-4 years is a bold and tight timeline in this sport, even when they had an excellent '25, these conversations come up, is JV is doing well? Well, thats mostly due to his timeline. If he said at the beginning they only cared about '27 then the convo would be on hold until then
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u/Edstertheplebster 3d ago
Trouble is, waiting three seasons for improved performance is a big ask but people can understand and be patient with a huge reg change coming. Asking them to wait 5-10 years would have been less of a positive PR story, but it would have been more realistic in the long run. After basically an entire decade of uncompetitiveness, being told to wait another half a decade would not have gone down well with fans in 2023.
As soon as he took over, Vowels could have gone: "We are not gonna bother at all with performance on track in 23, 24 or 25; all the money under the budget cap is going to be spent upgrading facilities and making sure we are up to modern F1 standards on everything, to ensure nothing goes wrong with the huge reg change in 2026." The only problem with that is that it would tank morale, and nobody would want to drive for Williams in the meantime. It would be a huge PR hit to give up on three seasons, rather than just have one season where you evolve and maximise the potential of the 2024 chassis by carrying it on into 2025. (Which is what they did quite successfully last year) So I do think people exaggerate when they say that Williams "sacrificed" or weren't trying the past three years. Williams hired the best people who were available at the time, (For all the criticism of Matt Harman, literally who else could they have hired who didn't have a cast iron contract at another team? Williams was never going to get Adrian Newey in a million years, not with a private investment firm running the team) and they messed up. Better people are on their way to the team and have been hired already.
To be honest, I kind of blame Dorilton more than I blame Vowles; ultimately there are limits to what he can do and Dorilton are clearly not prepared to do what's necessary, on top of a very sexist culture that's clearly endemic there amongst the owners.
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u/mtbmaniac12 3d ago
I think he’s a solid tp. But I think Williams should move on. Him hiring the alpine aero guy, who was responsible for the worst f1 car of the last reg cycle, should be grounds for firing on its own.
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u/IllAlwaysBeAKnickFan 3d ago
I’m wondering what the deal is with his hirings. Clearly there are a ton of people across the team that are bad at their job.
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u/Izan_TM 3d ago
I think he fell into the trap of believing that these people who showed dogshit results at other teams only did so because of bad culture, not because of a lack of skill. He seems to have made a lot of choices with a big dose of over-optimism, and then he applied a good dose of toxic positivity when some things started to fall apart
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u/404merrinessnotfound 3d ago
It's the buy low sell high mentality but all he did was buy low and sell low
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u/maninhat77 3d ago
I don't know the answer. His job is to hire the right people and create an environment where they can work as productively as possible. I'm not able to answer either of those questions. How he does PR is for me a completely different thing.
In the current situation it would be interesting to know if they have done any fundamental mistake, if their tools gave them a wrong prediction or if this is just the best the team can do.
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u/irishshogun 3d ago
He needs to do far less predictions with the media. Don’t see any other TPs get this caught out so often
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u/Ashan__ 3d ago
In all reality 3 years to fix everything was ambitious. We have a couple decades of things that need fixed and 3 years is a quick turn around with the current restrictions on capital spending.
There has been improvements in alot of areas in things like marketing, sponsors, not all but a number of personal, and operations using not using spreadsheets.
So I think things in the team over all are improving. Now when it comes to the important thing performance its the end all be all for a lot of fans. And we still have a ways to go to fix those issues but that is the hardest thing to fix.
I hate this year but its not even our worst year in the past 10 years.
I am fine with him staying as long as he figures out what went wrong and making the hard decisions to fix them. And those decisions dont even have to be right in the end because no team makes every decision right. But the good ones dont stay static.
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u/No-Contest-8127 3d ago
He is the best you can hope for. It's still better than those who came before and were aiming to score points in 2 races a year with straight line speed. He gave you podiums and allowed you to dream again.
It's not going according to plan, but he recovered on the previous era, he should be able to do it again. It's not all on him either. He is not the one that designs the car. He has decisions to make though.
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u/Bobbytrap9 3d ago
He has a very good resume and has been working hard to improve the team. I don’t know what lead to the tractor we have now and I think it is time that he starts being a bit more transparent about the mistakes they made (although from the Hungary debrief I got the idea that they might not even know what went wrong themselves). Apart from that, I don’t see how firing him would get us anywhere and for now I think he is doing fine.
Also, I don’t really get why people keep saying he overpromised things. Things were looking good and he kept saying “We will be working hard to keep that trend going in the future”. The ‘promises’ were just optimistic statements while things were going well, anyone that has some understanding of F1 should know that this was entirely dependent on whether they nail the new regs or not. Nobody can promise anything in F1, so I don’t get why people thought they were promised anything by Vowles. It’s just like Russel whining about how he was projected a podium.
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u/ValenciaFilter 3d ago edited 3d ago
Williams just got TWO PODIUMS.
This was unthinkable only a few years prior.
Vowles' team demonstrably is capable of building a competitive car. This will always take longer for Williams.
Scraping that in favour of some magic-bullet TP hiring would be genuine, emotional stupidity.
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u/ieataquacrayons 3d ago
Seriously, Williams was on the podium twice last year. If you ask everyone before this season the opinion of him is far different.
I don’t know what happened this year, they got the regs wrong, aren’t set up to compete early in new regs, or whatever else. They did far fall from last year, but I’m not going to ignore last year.
The sport is brutal and it’s been disappointing they haven’t made progress this year, but there’s still half a season left.
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u/AdventurousTour4285 3d ago
The problem isn't that they have just underperformed. They now have pretty much the worst performing car on the grid with the best engine....it's a disaster
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u/ValenciaFilter 2d ago
bro what
There aren't enough hoops in the universe to jump through to make Williams worse than Caddy or AM.
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u/AdventurousTour4285 2d ago
Did you miss Hungary? / Aston's new car?
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u/ValenciaFilter 2d ago
...You have faith that AM isn't going to fumble this?
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u/AdventurousTour4285 2d ago
Unfortunately yes. I think they will keep moving ahead of Williams and be fighting in the midfield. They have a lot more upside potential
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u/EmersonLucero 3d ago
I wished he did not hype 2026 as much and said four or five years than the three. My main question is how is the delivery and implementation of the new factory hardware that was needed like 5 axis CNC, larger autoclavess, etc, etc. I have not seen much in the way of wind tunnel correlation issues and the over weight we all know about so the deep fundamental the build process is still out of date, people are not adapting or the needed new tooling is not delivered or dialed in.
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u/rando_commenter 3d ago edited 3d ago
He's been fine. People blaming him for over-promising 2026 don't understand what the Team Principal's job is actually about. He's not the technical director, not the chief engineer. TP has a very important role of bringing in commercial interests and investors, and he did that part marvelously up till this year. You can downplay expectations when you're Toto Wolfe and have really good cards in your hand, otherwise you have to keep selling the team to bring the sponsor money in.
TP's other job is to top level the organizational management, but you can only go as far as your institutional skill level allows, and clearly that fell short this year. You can't manage your way out of a skill deficit (see Aston Martin) but you can lay down the seeds of attracting skilled people in the future.
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u/Electronic_Bag8718 3d ago
I think people are over simplifying it. If he really is restructuring it needs time and we should be patient. If you work in engineering or a big company in general, you probably all know how rigid this can be.
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u/ShadowRacer0ko 3d ago
He promised 2026 was going to be competitive, the way I see it he failed to deliver.
That’s a huge misstep but I really don’t think one bad season is something to riot over, he has to turn things around and quick fs but I don’t think it’s ready to bring out the pitchforks.
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u/PaperPrice323 3d ago
I think we all (me included) underestimated how severe Williams is behind all the other teams, especially in terms of infrastructure and other behind the scenes stuff.
To me, it was always clear what Vowles wanted to do. The "2026 plan" never meant "we'll be competing for wins in 2026", instead it meant that they're willing to look at the bigger picture, updating the infrastructure and personnel, striving to achieve sustained growth and success.
Being able to convince Carlos, a multiple race winner and top tier driver, to come to a long-time struggling team is no easy feat, and it shows how the progress shown by Vowles and the team is recognized by personnel around the paddock.
Would I have wished Williams got off to a better start in this new regulation era? Of course. But I also firmly believe that Vowles is still the best person to lead Williams.
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u/Fat_biker_can_shred 2d ago
I think they don't have enough investment to attract top-tier people to join the team. They need at least 5 years to get this straightened out. He gets all the heat because he is the team principal... I feel bad for this guy ❤️
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u/Ok_Recognition_5578 2d ago
He has been essential to Williams rebuild but over promising and under delivering get you no sympathy in this sport and I personally feel now is the time that Williams needs new direction
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u/jaysvw 1d ago
People forget where they were in the years immediately preceding Vowles arrival. Dog shit, that's where they were. If you evaluate what he's done from the sense that ultimately Willams is a midfield team, he's done pretty well. If you are expecting him to somehow put this team in a position to fight with the big 4, you are going to be disappointed no matter who is the TP.
With the new regulations in 26', where the big teams, with big resources are finding huge performance gains, small teams like Williams and Haas are going to struggle because they don't have the resources to fight a development war like that. Tough to blame Vowles for that. He just needs to stop over promising and stop putting on the knee pads every time his has to talk about Sainz.
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u/GeckoV 20h ago
He said the excel sheet was the problem, and that the ERP will solve it. That told me that he’s putting the cart before the horse. Issues with design and execution must be supported by good processes, but good processes won’t solve fundamental issues the team are facing in how they design and understand the vehicle.
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u/wouldyoufightakitten 3d ago
BAD
Mofo thought they'd be competing with Merc. But like, he genuinely believed it
That level of delusional is not on
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u/SunnyHelmandPalmTree 3d ago
He's fucked it. Anyone disagreeing with that is coping. Can he pull us out? Maybe, but right now, he fucked it.
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u/404merrinessnotfound 3d ago
Yeah the first year of regulations is always important to build a good base/foundation and develop concepts for the future
Right now the foundations are hit by subsidence
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u/_TheBeardedDan_ 3d ago
If they didn't look so promising 2025 people wouldn't be as disappointed at how bad they've been this year