Williams boss James Vowles has revealed the team orders issue that clouded its double-points finish in Formula 1‘s Miami Grand Prix was resolved “in about two minutes”.
The Grove-based squad scored an impressive haul in Miami, cementing its current status as the top midfield team on the grid, with Alex Albon finishing in fifth and Carlos Sainz eighth.
However, its good showing was blighted by a miscommunication between both drivers and the pit wall, which caused friction both at the time, and immediately after the race.
A series of early exchanges between the pair saw the Spaniard’s front wing get damaged, but he did not receive any discernible problems.
With Sainz ahead again, and implored the team to find “a rhythm,” adding: “I could do with a bit of help from Alex.”
Albon, though, appeared not to receive or understand the message and passed Sainz again on Lap 14, leaving his team-mate incensed.
After conveying his displeasure in the immediate post-race radio communications, Vowles agreed that the team needed “proper engagement” from the Anglo-Thai driver.
Sainz also later claimed he had been made to “feel stupid” by the team, which quickly denied Albon had ignored the order.
Speaking to media prior to this weekend’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, Vowles put the error down to it being the team’s first time “[doing] serious team orders”.
“Alex had a cooling issue, we needed some air in his radiator, and you can do that in two ways: you can overtake or you can drop back by over a second,” he said.
“Because the communication was nearly as long as that over the radio to engineers, there was now a discussion ongoing.
“Whereas one [engineer] went to the driver and said, ‘Don’t worry, Alex won’t attack’ the second one was still going through a debate of ‘tell me what we need to do here and what we need to do there’, because it was not clear.”
Vowles admitted that the team must take responsibility for the mistake, and gave an assurance that no such instance will happen again.
“That’s on us, we have to clear that up. For Carlos his frustration was he thought that Alex disobeyed orders or an engineer did. Neither of those happened.
“This is on us to make sure we fix on the pitwall. I can give you a guarantee it won’t happen again with what we’ve changed.”
Two ‘world-class’ drivers helping Williams progress
Vowles was full of praise for his two drivers, whom he described as “world-class”, adding that their skill out of the car as well as in it is proving to be a huge help.
When asked if the addition of Sainz, the first real high-level team-mate Albon has had at Williams, Vowles was diplomatic but complimentary.
“Reasonable,” he responded. “I can’t put a weighting on it, because I like to do that.
“But you need two drivers…if you look up and down the grid, who are the ones really with two proper drivers?
“And I said this all the way through, we are fortunate to really have two world-class drivers.
“It’s not just about how they drive the car, it’s how out of the car we are developing across the season.”
Vowles added that he is certain the team has made strides since the pre-season testing programme in February, largely down to aero tweaks and knowledge of the car as a whole.
“I’m confident we have added performance from the Bahrain test to where we are today.
“Some of it’s in the front wing updates. A lot of it is just how we extract the performance of the package.
“And with two drivers, you can actually double up the amount of effort in your set-up direction, which has got us to where we are today.
“So all I can tell you is, with just one of those drivers, there’s no way we would have been as fast as we were in Miami.”
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