Vowles: We know what we need to do to perform better

A Williams fan zone has been open in central London at Piccadilly Circus since the start of the week and this morning James Vowles, the head of the British team, spoke to fans there.

“We understand that we are not modernizing the car fast enough,” he admitted. – We have prepared several new technical innovations for Silverstone, but there will be a number of others presented in the next six stages of the season. Although in terms of chassis development percentages we are inferior to our rivals, and we know that.

In high temperatures our car doesn’t work efficiently, but when the weather is cooler we manage to fight for higher positions. Last Sunday in Austria the conditions were different, but now we understand much better why we struggled, also in Barcelona.

But more importantly, we already have an idea of ​​​​what needs to be done to perform better at Silverstone than in the previous two stages. The British Grand Prix is ​​​​the last race of a series of three in a row, and on the one hand the schedule is very tough, on the other hand there are certain advantages, because we will try to apply the conclusions drawn after Spain and Austria at Silverstone.

This is one of the great things about Formula 1: everything you learn and learn can be useful to you the next day, sometimes within an hour. Everything we discovered in Austria was already checked on Monday by Alex Albon, who was working on a simulator at the Grove base. Even this morning he continued with this work for two hours, in preparation for the coming weekend

If we talk about other features of the home stage, then our cars will look special these days, and as for the new version of the FW46 design, I have to say this: when I joined this team 18 months ago, there were about 760 employees.

We currently employ 1,005 people, and of course we decided to write the names of all our employees on the machine, not to count everyone, although that was not useful! (laughs) But the difference between these two figures reflects the level at which we started reforms and where we are aiming.

By writing the names of all our people on the car, we say thank you to them, because we have come a long way and there is still much to be done. But it is even more important to show that the progress of the team does not depend on one person or on me: it is the result of the joint efforts of more than a thousand employees.

I want to say to all the fans that you should not be too upset about the results of one single failed weekend. There will be more races like this, but the most important thing is that we are gradually moving forward and upwards to return to the top class. positions. You should not expect a turning point at Silverstone; it will most likely happen closer to the Dutch Grand Prix. We are preparing good updates for the car, but the upgrade process is taking longer than we expected.

As for this weekend, rain is expected on Friday and I advise everyone to take an umbrella. How this weather will affect us, whether it is good or bad for us, I do not know yet. Rain is possible on other days of the weekend, but I hope that we can perform in the home race with more confidence than a week and two weeks ago.”