In August 2020 Dorilton Capital purchased Williams from the Williams family for a reported £152m. Its mission statement was to return Williams to the top, investing however much time and money it would take. Easy to say, and predictably it was greeted with a certain degree of ‘heard it all before’ cynicism. But five years on, it’s a vastly improved team from that of 2019, albeit still progressing towards the light after so many years in the darkness. Dorilton, as it promised, is standing firm behind its commitment to its investment, helped no doubt by the increase in value of F1 itself since the purchase and therefore all the franchise teams within.

Williams is steadily being dragged into the 21st century but it’s a long haul. As Paddy Lowe observed all those years ago, there is no magic switch. It’s a matter of rebuilding from what two decades of underinvestment and resistance to change looks like.

“What that looked like,” says James Vowles, Williams team principal since January 2023, “was a certain infrastructure – and I don’t just mean physical buildings, but some of the tool systems were way out of date, just not invested in. Not to the right level. The bits that were there were stopgaps. They weren’t deep-invested solutions that provide you with 10 years of running. There were half the amount of autoclaves I was used to at Mercedes, for example. The clean room isn’t the right space for the people there to work as efficiently as possible. It’s very hard to get two individuals in the building to even look at each other in the eye, the way the building is laid out. It’s been formed ad hoc over time in a way which allowed certain people to work together as needed, but which closed them off to other departments, just reinforcing a singular approach rather than ‘we’re going to do this together’. The simulator is lovely and hand built. But very out of date.

“In the make-up of an F1 team you have a couple of hundred designers, a couple of hundred in production and we are producing metallic parts for the car but mostly composite. But the way our building is laid out it’s mostly for metallic because that’s how the cars were 20-plus years ago, even when we had a carbon chassis. So it’s structured in the wrong way for a modern F1 car. The design office wasn’t built for the number of designers we have today. We’ve outgrown it. Nothing was – the canteen, the parking… nothing. But you can’t fixate on those problems without breaking something elsewhere. So if I take production, for example, inspection was a bottleneck. Nothing was going through inspection fast enough because the space wasn’t good enough, we didn’t have enough tool systems to deal with it. But if we’d just fixed that you’re going to break something else – the next stage downstream. This long sequential system where you can fix one bit but it just moves the problem, changes the critical path. Those were the negatives.”

“There was an amount of passion in Williams, a lovely spirit”

The positives were imbued in the team DNA. “There was an amount of passion in Williams, a lovely spirit. It was not me who created that. It was the excellent work of Frank and I can see it in the building – and that makes this easier than it would’ve been because it’s individuals who will give you their all.

“But the team was in survival mode, for various reasons. In part finance, which it had lacked for many years. It had been working hand-to-mouth in a very manual way. You did everything you could to get your part to the track but you worked as an individual to do that. It was passion-driven with no structure. When I joined it felt like home within a week or two and that’s the beauty of this place.

“The biggest thing we’ve put in place was to get us pointing in the right way, using systems and processes rather than individuals wanting their bit to be at the track. We all want that but let’s do it in a priority order in a structured way, put some data around it to see if we are getting better or worse. No deep secrets, just a little bit of structure and that’s still ongoing because it takes time. It can feel uncomfortable making this change and at certain points it can slow you down.”

It did so in the winter of 2023-24 when Vowles and his then-new technical director Pat Fry instituted a revolution in car build simultaneous with a root-and-branch change of production control. Williams had been tracking stock, production and processes on Microsoft Excel when everyone had long-since developed sophisticated and personalised software which streamlined production, cut response times and reduced costs. That revolution coming at the same time as manufacturing the chassis in a totally different, more modern way (which saved around 14kg) while in the middle of a massive recruitment drive, caused some chaos and led to the ’24 car being late and overweight.

“You can build a £60m wind tunnel if you want, but you’ll take a hit”

“When you’re pushing new boundaries you’re going to trip and fall and that’s what happened at the end of ’23. We considerably changed quite a few of the routines and methods and put more work through the system. The chassis became more complex by a factor of 10 or 20 times. That ended up in a situation where we were relying on people going above and beyond to put us into a good state because the systems couldn’t keep up, exactly what we were trying to get away from.

“It taught me to make sure we do the steps and growth at the right rate. Don’t take monumental jumps without understanding what the impact will be.”

A certain amount of change had been made by Dorilton’s original choice of management – team principal Jost Capito and his associated technical director François-Xavier Demaison. Previously united at VW Motorsport, they were recruited to Williams shortly after Dorilton took over but stayed for less than two years. Although that partnership proved ultimately less than harmonious, Demaison did initiate a major upgrade on the wind tunnel and CFD computing power. He was addressing what he saw as necessary long-term projects and building a road map of where the investment should be made, helping structure the team for the future.

Vowles is not dismissive of the work that was undertaken before he arrived. “Some of the investment was good,” he says. “Our machine shop is in a really good place, for example. The composites area wasn’t – because there were no systems and processes in place. I’m not apportioning any blame on previous people because they were limited by different aspects. There was a lot to fix. They were fixing the bits that were in front of them and they had made tangible gains. But if you don’t have proper systems/culture/ processes you’re not going to get far. We’ve taken the team from 700 people to 1100, bringing in some of the best you can find up and down the pitlane, people who understand what great looks like. That allows us to keep that pathway going.”

Part of the appeal of Vowles to Dorilton and its advisers was indeed that he ‘knew what great looked like’ after 13 years with Mercedes, much of it as strategy chief but learning much of the art of management from Toto Wolff. He was also able to clearly see which parts of the operation were the furthest from the best and what the order of priority of investment should be. To that end, Vowles campaigned for an exemption to the capital expenditure part of the cost cap regulations, arguing that the team could otherwise be trapped, prevented by regulation from spending what was required to bring it up to standard.

“Yes, for ’23 I asked for more capital expenditure. I asked for £100m, got £20m. But the £20m was very useful. For the ’26 regulations it’s free on cap-ex [capital-expenditure] so we can spend what we need to build the machines we need. But all of the depreciation goes into your operational cap. So anything you invest in has a standard depreciation model. You can build a £60m wind tunnel if you want but you’ll take a massive hit in your cost cap depreciation – which will affect your running budget. So you have to be careful about how you spend your cap-ex. Which I think is a much better way of doing it actually.

“To build a component costs us more than others because we’re not as cost-efficient as most other teams. We have to get to the level where a new floor for the car costs the same in our building as it would elsewhere, and we’re not there yet. Which is where the investment comes in. So speed, quality and time are the three axis in which you want to continually improve.”

Competitive progress since the rock bottom of 2019 when Williams couldn’t even race the next-slowest car has not always been evident in the constructors’ championship and certainly last year’s sequence of accidents severely restricted the car’s development. But halfway through the season the team lies fifth, with Alex Albon and new recruit Carlos Sainz regular Q3 qualifiers. It’s not yet a top team but by almost all measures is ‘best of the rest’ after the big four of McLaren, Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari. Up to the Austrian Grand Prix its qualifying average was around 0.7sec adrift of the front, the smallest deficit since its BMW days at the turn of the century.

There’s a lot still to come. “Personnel we’re probably 80% of the way there,” says Vowles. “Most individuals who are highly qualified are on very long gardening leave contracts. You need to be prepared to wait three years. There are some great people joining at the end of this year. A lot more joining in ’26. That part gets easier. I used to need more words to convince people that we were really going places. Now the results are there to back it up so it makes the conversation easier in attracting top-tier talent.”

Amid all the talk about systems and culture, they are merely the ‘hygene’ factors, the things that need to be in place before a team can even contemplate being the best. With that foundation in place talent is still the differentiator, and Vowles is quick to acknowledge that.

“Speed, quality and time are the three axis you want to improve”

“Yes, it’s never going to be AI-designed cars. The talent will still be the ones who spend all week thinking about a problem and coming up with an idea, putting it on the table and saying ‘let’s look at this’. It’s still a set of humans collaborating to make a difference and aerodynamics is no different. It’s a series of highly intelligent people sitting down and thinking about how flow structures work when designing a car around it. The difference now is that it has KPI [Key Performance Indicators], tools and systems wrapped around it. The ideas come and the tools and systems accelerate the process significantly. So you can test ideas in hours or days rather than weeks or months. One of the KPIs is how quick from idea to production. The technology is to make sure we put our time and effort in making the fastest car possible. Because we’re in cost cap you want to maximise every dollar. You need technology to help you with that.

“But in terms of building/infrastructure/systems/processes – we’re only about 30-50%. Still a long way to go. I think the ’28 car will be the first one on which we’re firing on all cylinders and using everything in the right way. Until then we’re still… this year’s car is better because we have the foundations in place. Next year’s will be better because the foundations are more solid. The year after we’ll have a lot more structures and systems in place. Then 2028 is the first time we’ll have the right people in the right places with the right systems and structure.”

“We’re nowhere near the state to fight for a world championship today,” said Vowles after recently extending his contract with the team. “But the investment we’re doing is for that. It’s not to finish fourth or third.”

He was batting away a more outlandish suggestion made by former Williams and current Mercedes driver George Russell, who said: “When you look at how much more wind tunnel time they will have on McLaren [as part of the inverse championship position-available hours regulation], it’s immense. When you’re into a new era of regulations, finding masses of performance every single week you’re in the tunnel, maybe it won’t be one of the four top teams who is best next year…”