Williams guarantees F1 team order confusion “won’t happen again”

The Miami Grand Prix consternation between Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz over team orders was “resolved in two minutes”, according to Williams team principal James Vowles, who blamed team miscommunication.

During the Formula 1 grand prix weekend in Florida, Sainz was in a combative mood over the radio, having felt that Albon had violated a call to stay behind the Spaniard in the early stages of the race.

As it happened, Albon was told that he was nursing a water pressure issue and was asked to hold station behind Sainz – although the call came as the Anglo-Thai driver was in the process of making a DRS-assisted overtake on his team-mate.

Sainz was vocal in the aftermath, stating to engineer Gaetan Jego “that’s not how I go racing”, which prompted Vowles to bring both drivers into the debrief room after the race to explain the situation.

Vowles believes that the hatchet has been buried between the drivers, adding that the team has now tweaked its processes to ensure such issues do not reoccur.

“It got resolved in about two minutes when I had both of them in the room after the race. That is very much on us as a team,” Vowles explained.

“We’ve been in the situation where I think it’s the first time probably for us as a team we’ve had to do serious team orders.

“Given the whole background to it, Alex had a cooling issue that we needed some air in his radiator. You can do that in two ways. You can overtake or you can drop back by over a second.

“Because the communication was nearly as long as that over the radio to engineers, there was now a discussion ongoing, whereas one went to the driver and said: ‘Don’t worry, Alex won’t attack.’

“The second one was still going through a debate, ‘Tell me what you need to do here and what you need to do there’, because it was not clear. That’s on us, we have to clear that up.

“And so for Carlos, his frustration was he thought that Alex disobeyed orders or an engineer did. Neither of those happened. This is 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.

“The circumstance that happened after it is when we literally sat with both of them, Carlos went: ‘Okay, I understand it now. What are we doing in the future?’ ‘Fine, done.'”

Vowles explained that offering more concise instructions for the engineers to pass to the drivers was part of the new process to streamline the radio traffic. The drivers would then receive the rationale for the decisions later on.

“Race engineers actually, for a lot of it, are parrots. So if you give them a long-winded thing, they’ll have to start thinking through and break it up,” Vowles continued.

Carlos Sainz, Williams, Alexander Albon, Williams

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“If you explain, ‘instruction, do not overtake’, I guarantee you that will go to the cars and the cars won’t overtake together.

“That’s not what we did. It was a long discussion of what was going wrong, what corner it was going wrong, and how to mitigate against it with an instruction embedded in there.

“I let it all happen in real time, and then we had a discussion afterwards where we laid out a proper protocol for how to do it.

“It just needs to be short, concise, to the point, with the right person communicating to the right people in the right moment. That’s it. It’s not difficult.

“And as much as it sounds harsh, you have to be non-human about it. It’s just got to be, ‘do this, do it now, we’ll talk later’.”