Vowles warns: 'Will take years for Williams to get back to the front'

James Vowles has warned that it is likely to be years before Williams is back at the front of the midfield, let alone part of the leading team. Speaking to Formula1.com, the Williams team boss discusses the current state of the team, putting the blame mainly on the financial side of Williams.

The last time Williams managed to win a race was in 2012. The last time the team managed to win a championship was in 1997. A big aspect of that long period of disappointing results is the financial problems Williams has had in recent years. That eventually led to the Williams family parting ways with the team in 2020 and handing it over to Dorilton Capital.

"The team has over the last 15 years been through a tremendous amount of difficulty, financially and otherwise and it’s survived all of that," Vowles explains. "But it’s just survival, compared to other organisations that have had finance. As a result of that, you have these stark differences between where we are today and where we need to be in the future. The cost cap is just a limiting factor on all of these things, simply just because it puts us in a position where there’s a limited amount of capital, that won’t be enough to spend our way to success. So the pathway is to a certain extent the number of years required to get some of the core facilities to the level required to compete with the funds and that’s not the work of six months or 12 months."

'We need to keep improving'

2023 is far from going badly for Williams. In the first race, Alexander Albon managed to score points immediately and Logan Sargeant was not far behind. However, due to the competitive nature of the midfield, the team is once again last, and according to Vowles, it could be some time before that changes substantially.

"A realistic step for this organisation is to make sure every year, we are just pushing forward and not slipping back, so that has to be dream number one, and dream number two is we have to decide on a sensible time in the future – and it’s years – where we start to actually break into sixth, fifth, fourth. From then onwards, the sport will really have to have some level of political change to allow probably the teams to break into the top three."