Vowles: The problem with hard tires wasn’t just ours

Williams boss James Vowles has responded to some of the decisions his team made in Austin this weekend, which ultimately allowed Alex Albon and Logan Sargent to score points following the suspensions of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.

James Vowles: “We left Austin having achieved three very important points at the end of the weekend, and this is absolutely great because in the teams championship there is a very intense rivalry with Alfa Romeo, Haas and AlphaTauri. This team also earned points, more than us, but their lead is still quite big.

During the sprint weekends we always face difficult tasks, because we only have one hour to prepare the cars, while there is not one qualifying and one race ahead, but two qualifyings and two races.

Last weekend not all teams managed to cope with this task, and we were able to take advantage of that.

Logan Sargent opened the scoring with the points he earned, which is very important for both him and the whole team. He became the first American in thirty years to earn points in Formula 1, especially in his home race. I can confirm that the front wing of his Williams is not the same as that of Alex Albon’s FW45, which also had some impact on speed, but by the end of the year both cars will be identical in specification.

Currently our car is very sensitive to wind and temperature, and this is a problem we have to deal with. A small change in wind direction and strength on Sunday compared to previous days of the weekend noticeably changed the balance of the FW45. But these changes turned out to be quite beneficial for us.

Sprint weekends have their advantages, and one of them was that on Saturday we did quite a few laps on one of the compound tires, which allowed us to obtain information on both the intensity of wear and the degree of degradation. We opted for Medium tires for the sprint and after analyzing the data collected we were convinced that the single pit stop tactic for Sunday’s Grand Prix was not suitable for our car.

Then we focused on the two-stop option. At that time we didn’t know how bad the performance of the hard tires would be, but in any case we were forced to use them because the soft tires were too weak.

But it was not clear which scheme was better: Medium-Hard-Medium, Medium-Medium-Hard or Medium-Hard-Hard. We also had the idea of ​​starting on hard tires, but when it became known that four cars would start the race from the pit lane, we thought it would make sense for us to use the tires on which we would complete the least. laps for the first stint.

We, like most teams, fitted hard tires in the second segment and it immediately became clear that we had problems with these tyres. The balance of the car has changed, the understeer has deteriorated and the grip of the front wheels has deteriorated. Moreover, this problem was not only with us, but also with many other teams.

There was no option but to fit Medium tires for the last part of the distance, and we only had the rolled-in sets that had already completed many laps. But we understood that the difference in speed compared to Hard would still be very noticeable. We also had to extend the final stint as much as possible – up to the limit the tires could withstand.

This allowed the Alfa Romeo drivers to stay ahead of the race and Alex Albon finished in a respectable 11th place on the circuit.”