Williams Racing Team Principal James Vowles attended the FIA’s pre-race press conference alongside Guenther Steiner (Haas) and Christian Horner (Red Bull) on Friday afternoon.
Ahead of the 80th Monaco Grand Prix, James answered questions from the media on topics ranging from the damage to Alex Albon’s car in FP1 to the future of Williams Racing.
Here’s a summary of what JV had to say.
On the damage to Alex’s car from FP1 (which the team fixed in time for FP2)
Quite a bit of damage. It’s both front and rear corner, rear wing, beam wing I think as well, probably, bodywork may be unscathed – I didn’t have time to look at it before I came here – but it’s a feature of Monaco really, you’ve got to start pushing and find the limit.
Just on this particular occasion, it really is just a question of kilometres an hour – about 2km/h more than the previous lap in and he lost the rear end.
I’m pretty confident we’ll make it back out again [for FP2].
WATCH: Getting Alex's car ready for FP2
Behind the scenes in the garage as the team repair Alex's car in time for FP2.
On how much of a setback it is for Alex given the nature of Monaco
Where you really suffer is when you miss most of the session as a result of it – or don’t fully understand why that even happened – but here on the data, I think he’ll look at it and understand fairly clearly what happened in that circumstance.
And as long as you can contain it and understand what went wrong, I don’t think it’ll be a setback particularly at all. The biggest item is clearly… no team, I don’t think, is flush with spares, especially these rear wings, the first time it’s appeared on the car. So you’re just going to be short on stock at some stage.
On the belief that Monaco can still throw up opportunities lower down the grid
I think we have to be realistic. We’ve got at least four very, very competitive teams in front. And today, if you look at the top four, they were separated by milliseconds. You've got [Fernando] Alonso coming back to the fore, you’ve got Ferrari right there and Mercedes, pretty much there or thereabouts with Max [Verstappen] as always in the mix.
So, we have to be honest and be realistic with ourselves, you need a tremendous amount of an odd result, weather perhaps that would come away and that doesn't look to be the case this weekend.
But I'm still optimistic that we have a car and we have a team that can fight for a point at the back, against Haas, against all the others. And that's really the main thing out of it. You can get enough attrition here at this race, you can get enough circumstance to fall your way in order to score a point.
On the future direction of Williams Racing
On direction, we’re clear on where we're going. We're in a good state of getting what we need in terms of technical structure in place. There's nothing to talk about yet but there will be I hope within the next few months.
There's reorganisation going on all the time behind the scenes and pressure points really trying to squeeze the team and understand where we have strengths and where we have weaknesses. And that's an ongoing process that will be the work of years rather than months.
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On how we make Williams an attractive proposition for the best recruitment
I think the main thing is this: we're in a position where we can break what we have in existence, and rebuild it from the foundations, ground-up, into a solid mechanism. We have finance, we have investment that's available to us, as do a lot of teams.
But irrespective, that is available to us at the moment. And we have the willingness and desire to even compromise this year and next as needed and as required in order to make sure that we make the jump back forward of the field.
And that's a tougher decision if you're racing for fifth, or sixth in the Championship. Much easier when you're Williams. And then you have the legacy you have. It doesn't take long to walk around the Experience Centre and look at all the Championship cars to realise the legacy this team comes with.
On Logan’s start to life in F1, particularly given there have been so many street tracks
I probably didn't realise before the start of the season, just how many of these circuits are quite different to the norm – because also you'd argue Australia, he had never even seen it before, just in a sim and that’s about it.
And that's a tough track to get to grips with very quickly. And as you said, by the time you do Saudi, Baku, Miami, and here, that's a mix of tracks that each have their own characteristics, but you can't really learn the limits of the car in those sorts of circumstances.
It’s much easier to do so at a Barcelona or Silverstone, somewhere where you can play with the car a little bit more without too much risk. I think he's got the right approach.
If you see here, he's just building up, session on session, which is the right way of approaching Monaco. And you see the odd lap from him that really shows the talent and the performance he has. It's bringing that all together now with the experience in the car.
On the uniqueness of Monaco
We have to remember this is the 80th Monaco Grand Prix and there’s a reason behind that, which is that it's an exceptional event. If you just go outside and look around and see the amount of people that are drawn to this event, there's a reason behind it. It is one of the crown jewels of our season. It's completely different.
Christian [Horner] pointed out the cars are potentially too big now. But it has its place, certainly in the short term, that any of us can see within this room. And it provides a completely different experience to say, Miami. That's a good thing.
I'm not sure we want everything to be exactly the same. The only element is to that point: we just need to think about what this looks like in 10 years’ time and what the adaptability needs to be to suit it.
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