Williams F1 boss James Vowles has given Alex Albon and Franco Colapinto carte blanche to attack at the Qatar Grand Prix, despite a perilous situation.
Grove's team is short of spare parts after a series of crashes since the United States Grand Prix, including three big incidents on Sunday at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix that prevented Albon from starting, and for Colapinto the last time in Las Vegas which reached 50 G.
This follows a series of accidents earlier in the season, with the team suffering 15 notable incidents which required major rebuilding work.
This put the team at the limit of its spare parts, with only one spare front wing available between the Qatar Grand Prix and the end-of-season test in Abu Dhabi. And there is no more spare chassis!
But as he thinks about the situation, Vowles is determined not to restrict his drivers.
“It's not about holding back or restricting themselves, because that too often causes a negative effect, so they are free to give their all. What we did to define that is that during free practice it You have to take the time to integrate everything, without taking any risks.”
“You saw it with Franco, he did the Freestyle without risking his car, but qualifying is qualifying and the race is the race, we are here to give everything we can.”
“We're trying to contain it as much as possible so as not to hurt next year's program, but when you're at those kinds of numbers in terms of damage, it means you're not focusing on improving the performance, you're just redeveloping the status quo.”
“It's frustrating, in 25 years of F1, I don't remember a situation this bad. At the slightest big crash, without a spare chassis, the season will be over for one of them.”
In budgetary terms, Vowles decided to sacrifice improvements to the factory so as not to impact 2025 and, above all, 2026.
“What this has resulted in is that we have had to reallocate a certain amount of the budget to this year, which is frustrating and I wish it had gone towards improving the tools at the factory by example.”
Vowles arrived at Williams in early 2023 and began a major restructuring of the team's racing operations. Despite these setbacks, he insists that the team's development will not be affected.
“Most of the accidents happened towards the end of the season, so at that point you try to focus more on the next year.”
“This has not slowed down the transformation we are carrying out internally. We have already freed up enough resources to ensure we are focused on developing for 2026. For 2025, we are redeveloping the way we do business and structure all of our operations, these are cut out and segmented so that we can further transform ourselves.”
