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Vowles says securing Sainz was a “major event” for Williams

Williams boss James Vowles admits that the process of getting Carlos Sainz to commit to the team was a “rollercoaster” – and he says that he didn’t believe it was realistic until the contract was actually signed.

The Grove team announced on Monday that Sainz has agreed to a long-term deal, having turned down firm offers from Sauber/Audi and Alpine.

Vowles says that discussions about bringing Sainz to Williams first started in Abu Dhabi last year, long before Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari made the Spaniard a free agent for 2025.

He thought a deal was close around the time of the Spanish GP, only for the team to have a poor race weekend, and in effect delaying Sainz’s decision.

“The moment it looked realistic is when his pen hit the paper, that’s the only time I thought it looked realistic,” said Vowles.  “I got stung earlier in the year around Barcelona time.

“I thought we were in a very good state, and that’s on our shoulders. We had a shockingly bad event, and you can’t do that in professional sport.

“But from the perspective of the ups and downs, it’s been a tribulation up and down all the way through from I would describe it as Monaco onwards I think, it’s probably the right timeline.

“But it’s been a rollercoaster, that’s for sure. But it hasn’t been a rollercoaster for any more than actually, the driver market has been really up and down.

“There’s no teams that have properly been committing or deciding their direction of travel right at the front, and that includes right up until now, last weekend. where there’s still discussions over where does Perez go, what changes there?

“And when you have that instability, it’s completely normal that a driver won’t commit to you until such point as they know what their future holds and what doors and avenues are closed. That’s my opinion of it. So as I said, until pen hit paper, I wasn’t comfortable.”

Vowles admitted that beating a major manufacturer like Audi to secure Sainz’s services was a major coup for the team, and reflects its potential for improvement.

“I think it’s a huge, huge event for Williams to have two of the best drivers in the world fighting at the front,” he said. “And I think it is very much a sign of things to come, the fact that we are prepared to have the investment required to be there.

“And a lot of it you can’t see. The one that you can materially see is what we’re doing by effectively putting money where it should be, into the best drivers that are available to us.

“In terms of beating an OEM, and one of the largest in the world, I’m incredibly proud. I said it to him on this, it’s one of the proudest moments of my career, and I’ve had lots of great moments my career.

“The fact that he chose us above all else is a huge, huge, monumental decision. Then, on top of that, we have to be straightforward. Alpine are ahead of us on points this year, and on points ahead of us last year as well, I recognise all of that.

“What he’s not buying into is ‘25, what he’s buying into is what can we provide over the next two years, and what’s the direction of travel.”

Vowles worked hard to convince Sainz that Williams will be a much stronger force heading into 2026 and beyond, having explained why the team will have a difficult time during the building process in 2024-’25.

“I think the first thing is, the conversation has been many months,” he said. “It hasn’t been weeks of which you’ve been privy to some of it, because it’s been a bit more public than I would normally do with a driver discussion, but it actually started way back in Abu Dhabi last year. And the message I gave to him and to his family at the time is no different.

“The message I gave him last weekend in Spa, to be clear. And I believe that’s what’s won it. From the beginning, I gave him warts and all.

“’Here’s what’s going to happen. We are going to go backwards. Here’s why, here’s what we’re investing in, here’s what’s coming. Here’s why I’m excited by this project, and it’s your choice if you want to be a part of it. But I know that we will have success in the future, and I know it’s going to cost us in the short term.’ And I’m confident that that honesty and transparency has paid off.”

Vowles says Sainz in turn kept him fully informed of his thought process in terms of the pros and cons of the competition, thus giving him a chance to state the case for Williams – but he insists without criticising rivals.

“He’s been very consistent on his messaging from the beginning,” said Vowles. “I’ve really loved this process. I wish we could have sort of documented it, and had a little camera, and you would have seen it!

“It was great. He and I have spent some evenings in various hotel locations, including his room, at times, where we’ve had some of the best chats I’ve had, because he’s just this fiery, performance-filled entity. It’s just brilliant. I wish you could be a fly on the wall to observe it.

“And he’s been pretty consistent in his messaging back, which is here are all the positives that you can’t see because you wear a William shirt of all these other entities. And my job back in return is to say, here are the positives of Williams, and here’s the difference.

“I’ve never changed on what those positives are, and I’ve done it in a way that is not putting down other entities.

“I don’t believe that’s correct, or right to do so. And what he’s been doing in time is seeing how some of those positive strands maybe don’t exist elsewhere. That’s probably the best way I can put it to you.”

Leclerc didn’t expect Mercedes to be so fast in the Belgian race

Charles Leclerc insists that the Belgian GP was not a “positive weekend” for his Ferrari Formula 1 team despite taking pole and finishing fourth and only 8.5 seconds behind original winner George Russell.

Leclerc, who subsequently moved up to third when the English driver was disqualified for being underweight, noted that a strong performance was outweighed by the fact that Mercedes proved faster in the race.

He acknowledged that he expected that McLaren and Red Bull would be more competitive than Ferrari, but not Mercedes.

“If it was a Red Bull in front then I think it would have been a positive weekend,” he said. “But now it was a Mercedes, which we thought we were on a par with, and they had the edge on us. I don’t consider this result a very positive one.”

He added: “I think fourth was what I thought would be the best result possible today, with two McLarens in front, and one Red Bull.

“But again, that’s what makes me not so happy about today, is that we have two Mercedes and one McLaren in front, and the Mercedes, we thought that we were on a par with them. So yeah, worse than expected.”

Like others Leclerc expected McLaren to be the team to beat in Sunday’s race.

“I personally thought that McLaren had huge advantage of pace for this weekend, which I saw a little bit less today,” he said.

“They were still the fastest, probably with Red Bull and Mercedes today, but I thought McLaren had the edge.

“It’s good to see that everybody’s so close, but unfortunately, we are still the fourth fastest team, and the top three keeps changing, but we are consistently behind them, on a par with Mercedes. We just need more pace.”

As the first stops as rivals pitted Leclerc suggested to the team that he if he was going to be undercut, he should go long.

However he then stopped on lap 12, just one lap after Lewis Hamilton, Sergio Perez and Oscar Piastri, the cars immediately around him.

“It’s very, very difficult to know at that point,” he said when asked by this writer about his radio request.

“Because when you have so many cars, obviously we were in a position where second on track, when you are getting undercut by one car, two cars, three cars, four cars, it starts to be quite tricky, and you take a lot of risks.

“It was just better to align ourselves to the other strategy. We didn’t know even what was the hard like, because we hadn’t run it before the race.

“So all of this, I don’t think it’s fair to say that we did a mistake at that point, and I understood the point of view of the team.

“I just felt like the raw pace is not good enough. And when it’s like this, unfortunately, you can do whatever you want with the strategy, but you’re always going to lose places. We are just not fast enough.”

Leclerc suggested that it would have been difficult to replicate the one-stop strategy used so well by Russell.

“It was one of our plans, but I knew that it was very, very, very unlikely for me to do so,” he said.

“Just for the reason I explained before, when you are in front to keep going and to get undercut by three, four cars and just lose so many positions if the one-stop doesn’t work, it was just better to align ourselves with the guys behind.

“But we knew it wasn’t too far, But I think they just had more pace, so they made the one-stop work, because they were super, super strong today. So we had it on our card. It was just not possible in our race situation.”

Asked to summarise the season so far he admitted that Ferrari has work to do.

“Our first half really good,” he said. “I think we couldn’t hope for better. We maximised the potential of the car. Then we’ve had four races where we’re going extreme setups from extreme setups.

“And for me, it was just impossible to get to quali and to know where the limit of the car was. And we lost a lot of points.

“And the last two races, we focused again on maximising the results, and I think we did, but just not fast enough, as I said.

“So that’s where we really need to focus and to do a step for the second half if we want to have any better results.”

Sergio Perez endured a difficult run to eighth place on the road in the Belgian GP amid the ongoing internal debate at Red Bull over his Formula 1 future.

Perez has clearly been under pressure to raise his game after a disappointing recent run, and he did a good job to qualify third at Spa, before gaining a spot from the grid penalty taken by team mate Max Verstappen.

Prior to the race Red Bull’s simulations suggested that from second on the grid he could hang on to third place, while team mate Verstappen could climb to fifth from 11th.

The Mexican ran third initially behind Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, but he slipped down to eighth at the flag before George Russell’s penalty gifted him a place.

Red Bull is having a meeting on Monday that could potentially lead to a reshuffle of the drivers across its two teams for the rest of the season and heading into 2025, with some VCARB filming day and TPC car running at Imola this week potentially having an impact.

Reserve driver Liam Lawson and F2 championship leader Isack Hadjar are both waiting in the wings, while Daniel Ricciardo has some momentum behind him.

It was clear after the race that much more was expected of Perez at Spa.

“Starting on the front row our objective pre-race was we felt that third and fifth would be achievable,” said team boss Christian Horner.

“We achieved the fifth [with Verstappen], but we didn’t achieve the third. We obviously need to go through the data to understand where his loss of pace was. I think that based on his starting position we didn’t envisage finishing eighth from second on the grid.

“Checo’s had a tough run over the last few races. And what’s so confusing for us is the season started so well for him, and then has tailed off.

“He did a great job, a super job in qualifying yesterday. Obviously, we need to go through and understand the issues in the in the race. We’ve got the time to do that and analyse that and work with him.”

However he downplayed the significance of the timing of Monday’s discussion: “We’re constantly analysing, constantly looking at things. We’ve got a meeting tomorrow, but it’s not just about Checo. We have other topics on the agenda as well, which we always do going into the summer break.”

Perez explained that his race was compromised by PU issues that cost him performance, and by a short middle stint, with his early pit stop clearing the way for pursuer Verstappen.

“I was just struggling a lot on the straights,” he said. “I don’t know what was going on, but I had to save battery early on in the first couple of laps. And I was just very weak on the straights.

“And once I managed to clear it, charge the pack a bit, I was pretty much the same as Lewis and Charles, I was staying there. But then the second stint, jumping onto the medium tyre with all the traffic behind, it just made it really, really difficult, very tricky, and we did quite a short stint as well. 

“So yeah, we were just out of sync. I think we were just not good with the tyres today. Balance wasn’t there as well. So yeah, plenty of things to analyse on our side.”

“I think there were some strategic reasons behind it, but I don’t know why we went so short. I think we were obviously very compromised by having just two sets of mediums. 

“So again, I think strategically, it wasn’t a perfect execution. It’s something that we will get together as a team and obviously understand.”

Perez insisted that one poor race will not decide his future.

“Yesterday I had a good qualifying, a good day,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything. I think we have too much going on in the team, a lot of things that we have to focus on, and we cannot waste any energy with all this speculation surrounding.

“So this is the last time I will speak about the future. Just to make it clear for everyone, I will not answer any more questions about my future.”

Fernando Alonso says Aston Martin’s call to stop him only once in the Belgian GP was not planned – and it needed “a little bit of luck” to work.

Alonso was one of only five drivers to stop only once, along with original race winner George Russell, Yuki Tsunoda, Kevin Magnussen and his own team mate Lance Stroll.

Alonso used the unexpected strategy to finish ninth on the road, which became eighth when Russell was disqualified for a weight infringement.

At the previous race in Hungary he was left frustrated after what he thought was an unnecessarily early first stop as the team reacted to other soft tyre starters coming in.

“We had the plans, as always, Plan B, Plan C, whatever,” said Alonso. “So we covered the one-stop and the three-stops. We were P12, and we were just waiting for a safety car, maybe to play in our hands.

“And then 11 laps in the end, we started considering, ‘Okay, safety car is not coming, but maybe we go to the end?’

“So it was just being very flexible, and lap-by-lap, judging the conditions, and at the end, it was the right call. But let’s say it was not planned just to go for one-stop.”

Like Russell Alonso was able to make it work because degradation was not as bad as had been feared, and the tyres didn’t fall off a cliff.

“I think especially with the new asphalt, you sometimes get very low deg,” he said. “Or you get graining, you can have the two things. And today was one of those days. Maybe the temperature helped, to be a little bit hotter on Sunday.

“We had a lot of graining on Friday, and we didn’t have any today, but I think no one could predict even the last five laps. If the degradation was not linear, and you have a big cliff, the strategy will not work. It’s a little bit of luck sometimes when you take these decisions.”

Alonso conceded that having track position by staying out and obliging two-stoppers to catch him helped the strategy to work, while his choice of a higher downforce level – which protected the tyres from sliding – was also key.

“It depends to the cars you’re fighting,” he said of track position. “In our case it was crucial, because the Williams and the Alpines, they were the two fastest cars [on the straights], and if you fall behind, the race is over.

“So we underestimated a little bit that, but at the end our car thanks to the extra drag and downforce, maybe was taking care of the tyres a little bit better, and made it possible to do one-stop. So it was a trade-off, and I think it was the right call for us.”

Asked to review the first half of the season Alonso admitted that it hasn’t been what he had expected.

“A little bit disappointed,” he said. “We cannot hide the fact that we are fighting today, with Williams, RB and Alpine last year, we were looking maybe to the top four teams.

“Now they are out of reach, and we are just defending from the guys behind. Even at the beginning of the year in qualifying, especially, we were always top five, top six, in the mix.

“So definitely a lot of work to do for us in the summer break, and the second part of the year. We will not give up.”

Vowles is pretty confident that Williams will get the nod from Sainz

Williams Formula 1 boss James Vowles says “the odds are in our favour” in terms of the chances of signing Carlos Sainz for 2025 and beyond.

He also indicated that an announcement could come as early as next week, before the summer break, after he drew a “line in the sand” in terms of the decision process.

Sainz has been considering his options since Ferrari announced that he would be replaced by Lewis Hamilton in 2025, with Audi, Alpine and Williams the three choices that he had been considering in recent weeks.

Management changes at the first two, plus Alpine’s plan to use customer engines from 2026, have given him extra food for thought.

Vowles is convinced that Williams is now the favourite to land him.

“More than 50%, how’s that?,” he said when asked what the chances were of securing the Spaniard.

“How confident am I? I think the odds are in our favour, but I’ve been stung by this already once this year. So let’s see.”

Regarding the possibility of a driver announcement in the coming week he said: “Tentatively, yes. I think I’ve already said before, going into summer break, yes. And I think there’s a there’s a line in the sand that I’ve created, and I hope it’s one that we remain within.”

Vowles has long stressed that Sainz is the team’s number one target, with Valtteri Bottas the likely Plan B.

“I’m open minded, but I want excellence within the team,” he said. “I want race-winning performance within the team. I want individuals that are leaders. In other words, they’re established.

“So out of all those, the top of the list, I’ve said it from the start, I’ll maintain it here now as well, is Carlos.

“In adversity last year, he won a race, and he did it in a bloody intelligent way, against some of the best individuals, that includes Lando and Charles. He beat them in the circumstances.

“I know he had a pretty poor qualifying yesterday, but look at Q1 and Q2 he’s there or thereabouts. He brings excellence along with him. And I’ve said it once, and I keep saying it, that is where my heart is set, and let’s see if the journeys collide.”

Vowles stressed that he has worked hard to convince Sainz to come on board.

“It’s interesting conversations he and I have had pretty late into a few nights, and we present it from both sides,” he said.

“My perspective is this. I know I wear Williams shirt, but I believe so much in what we’re doing. That’s why I left Mercedes to come here.

“I believe in everything we are doing here, and I’m in it day-to-day, and I can see the changes day to day.

“With Carlos, he can’t see much of that. What he looks at is what you can see externally. Where are you, where have you qualified? Why did you have a bad race here? What’s going on here?”

Vowles admitted that Audi’s offer is tempting for Sainz: “He has one of the largest OEMs in the world chasing him. That’s hard to turn down, an OEM that his father has won with.

“At the same time, he has a team [Alpine] that has, let’s be clear about it, historically, beaten us, fundamentally, and again, that becomes hard to turn down. They won races not that long ago, or won a race not that long ago [Hungary 2021].

“But irrespective, I can see that perspective on things. Here’s what he told me, which actually resonated the most – ‘the reason why I’m doing this is when I commit, I need to commit with all my heart, and all my soul, 100% and to do that means I can’t have any doubts.’ And that’s why it’s taking the time. And that resonated with me a lot.”

Expanding on Sainz’s decision process he said: “He’s a very sensible chap. Whatever happens with Audi, they are an OEM, they’ll pour what is required financially into this to make it successful. 

“And I think change there? I’m not sure if it’s good or bad. I’m not enough in the team to be able to know it, but I don’t think that’s necessarily resonating.

“Remember, he’s looking at the long term, what’s the right long term solution, and with Alpine, they’ll take an amount of pain, and then they’ll have an amount of success from it as well.

“At the same time, I think he’s trying, as you all are as well, to weigh up what the options are. I’m biased.

“We’re a stable management here. We have no changes ongoing, and we have a hell of a lot of investment in the background. This is why, for me, it’s an easy decision for him.”

Gasly is running more downforce than Ocon at Spa

Alpine Formula 1 drivers Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly have gone in very different directions on downforce levels for the Belgian GP – and it didn’t work out as expected in Saturday’s wet qualifying.

As part of a general package of updates the Enstone team brought a new low drag wing to Spa.

It was tried for the first time in FP2, and while Ocon preferred to stick with it for qualifying and the race, Gasly went back to a high downforce version.

He should thus in theory have had the advantage in the wet qualifying session, and indeed he was an impressive second in Q1.

However he slipped back to 12^th in Q2 while Ocon progressed to Q3 and earned what became ninth place on the grid after Max Verstappen’s penalty was applied.

“A good afternoon for us,” said Ocon when asked by this writer about his session. “I think we optimised well the car potential today. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any new sets for Q3, which hurt us a little bit.

“We decided to stick on a dry setup, to have little bit more straight-line performance. That’s why we were very quick in sector one. And we decided to split across cars, which is never an easy decision as well. But to me, it was quite important, the race aspect of things.

“And if it’s dry tomorrow, touching wood, we can hopefully look ahead and have some good opportunity, more than looking behind, looking to fall back, really.

“On the dry it was clear that it was the better option. Obviously, on the wet, it should be quicker, the higher downforce. But yeah, today we’ve maximised the potential we had. And even with the light car in sector two, we were quite strong in general.”

Ocon noted that as qualifying went on he was able to understand how best to make use of his low-drag configuration.

“Pierre in Q1 was a good, four or five tenths quicker,” he said. “I kind of thought that’s how we are going to qualify, basically, it was quite clear.

“But somehow after a couple of runs I managed to figure out where I could gain from that low downforce and use the potential of it. And it turned out to work alright in the end.”

He added: “I think we were on the max downforce in Budapest, and we killed the tyres. So we go the other way.”

Meanwhile Gasly remains hopeful that his wing choice will prove beneficial in Sunday’s race.

“On my car we decided to go with more downforce,” he said. “So a different approach between the two cars. We’ll see if it pays off tomorrow in the race. But we’re quite confident that it matched what we expect in terms of gains with this new package.

“We know it can be a long race here. It’s going to be hot tomorrow. It was between the one and two stop before, and we seemed quite good on the tyre. So we’ll have to see what we can do.

“But I think we’re going to be in the fight for P10, P9 with these guys ahead of us. So that’s where our race will be.”

Gasly admitted that things went wrong for him as qualifying progressed and he had issues with tyre temperatures.

“Q1 was really good,” he said. “The car felt great, and the track obviously dried up a bit. And I just think we got it wrong with our out-laps, going faster in the out-laps, and my tyres were cooked every time in my push laps.

“So just from a very strong balance and potential in Q1 the car just felt very different in Q2. I’m doing the same lap time when the track’s drier, and it’s just quite disappointing because there was obviously good potential. But that’s the difference between a Q3 and Q2.”

Fernando Alonso believes that the Belgian GP will be a step “into the unknown” for all teams and drivers given the limited preparation time.

Having qualified ninth the Spaniard is hoping that a higher downforce level than some of Aston Martin’s immediate rivals will prove beneficial in terms of tyre usage during the race, due to less sliding.

Rain on Saturday meant that teams only had Friday to prepare for what is expected to be hot and dry race on Sunday, with a new track surface making it hard to judge how tyres will behave over the full distance.

“We go into the race into the unknown I think for everybody,” said Alonso. “We had a little bit of long runs yesterday, but in this track, being so long the lap, you cannot do more than six or seven laps, because of time restrictions on the sessions.

“So with the new asphalt, it’s very grippy, but we don’t know exactly the degradation tomorrow.

“The good thing is that with a wet qualifying, we have all the dry tyres available for everybody, so we should be able to push all the way through.”

Asked who his competition will be in the race he said: “Not the cars in front, unfortunately! But I think we will have to see behind us. It’s going to be a challenging race in terms of tyre degradation, some nice battles for sure.

“I think we have the Alpines very fast this weekend. We have, I think, Albon as well, very fast. So, yeah, I think that will be our battle.

“They are a little a bit quicker on the straights. We have a little bit more downforce in the car, maybe we take care better on the tyres. So hopefully that comes to us at the end of the race.”

Alonso, who will gain a place on the grid thanks to a PU penalty for Max Verstappen, believes that he couldn’t have done better in qualifying, indicating that it was the best he felt in the car all weekend.

“P9 behind the top four teams probably was the maximum today,” he said. “So happy with that. The car felt good in qualifying. I struggled a little bit the rest of the three practices this weekend. I was never confident in the car. I needed three or four laps to get the rhythm into the session.

“So finally now in qualifying I was flat out since lap 1, and yeah, that extra confidence, it was very important in these kinds of conditions.”

Regarding the latest updates he added: “We’ve been experimenting with the setup yesterday as well. So yeah, the new upgrades are a little bit more optimised.”

Alonso says that the AMR24 upgrades worked well in Hungary

Fernando Alonso says that his Aston Martin Formula 1 team is “a little bit more calm” after the upgrades introduced for the AMR24 worked successfully.

This season the Silverstone team has struggled to get performance out of the car, and earlier upgrades haven’t always worked as planned.

Despite the fact that the team came away from Budapest with only a humble 10^th place for Lance Stroll Alonso says that the new parts made a difference.

“I think we are quite happy with how the new package worked in Hungary,” he said. “It’s doing what the wind tunnel was saying.

“And we had a very good correlation, which was very important, after a few other upgrades were a little bit more up and down.

“So I think the team is quite happy with Budapest. Not forgetting that this is only the first step, and we are still long way off where we want to be.

“But now that it seems that we found a path, and we see on track what we see on the wind tunnel, maybe it’s easier for us to add downforce now, without any scare of not seeing it on track.”

Underlining that he now expects upgrades to work well from now on Alonso noted: “We are a little bit more calm after the Budapest upgrade in terms of what is coming for the future, or what will come in the future.

“Maybe the team has now a better understanding of where to put performance, with the safety that it will add lap time, and it will make the car faster. So this was a key upgrade for us, I think, and it worked as expected. So it gives us more confidence, for sure.”

Alonso says the progress made by rival teams has shown Aston Martin that a package can be improved.

“Mercedes this year and McLaren last year, both of them they proved that it’s possible to recover a significant gap to the leaders,” he said.

“Mercedes was fighting with us for four races, and now they won two Grand Prix. McLaren was out of Q1 for few races at the beginning of last year, and they were fighting for victory. So it is possible.

“It’s up to us, it’s up to the team to understand the upgrades. Where are the key parts of the car to find performance? How to find that performance? We have the facilities. We will have the wind tunnel at the end of the year.”

In the short-term Alonso expects the AMR24 to be competitive in Belgium this weekend.

“I don’t see any reason why not,” he said. “I think Budapest probably was, at least on our expectations, a little bit more difficult. Maybe Spa is a little bit better for our package.

“But we changed the car so much in Hungary that we come here with some extra tests to do, after all the learnings of Budapest. So I think FP1, FP2, we still have to dedicate them to test the new package. And let’s see where we are.”

He added: “We have a lot of test ideas to maximise the package. But also the weather is not looking great for tomorrow, so maybe we don’t have that possibility.

“It will be gold if it’s dry, because I think we can optimise a little bit the car, and then we need to be in the points. Both cars in the points, both cars in Q3, that’s the clear target.”

Alonso made an interesting observation about why it’s so hard for teams to optimise their cars under the current regulations.

“The pursuit of adding downforce the car is more fragile, and more peaky on everything that you do,” he said. “Obviously one thing is testing cars on the wind tunnel, on ideal and consistent conditions.

“And on a racetrack, here in Spa you go at 60km/h in Turn 1, you go at 300 in Tune 10-11. The last corner, it goes uphill, I think, 8%.