Vowles vows no more team orders confusion at Williams

Williams have made changes to avoid repeating the situation in Miami where Carlos Sainz mistakenly thought Alex Albon had ignored orders not to pass, team boss James Vowles said on Tuesday.

Sainz complained after the May 4 Formula One race that he had been made to “feel stupid” after being informed Albon would hold position behind only for the Thai to then overtake.

“That is not how I go racing. I don’t care. I’ve lost a lot of confidence here, on everything,” the Spaniard, who joined from Ferrari in January, said over the team radio.

Vowles told reporters at the team factory that the matter had been resolved in about two minutes once he sat down with the drivers after the race.

Albon ended up fifth with Sainz ninth in Williams’ best result in six races so far this season.

The team are fifth in the standings going into this weekend’s Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in Imola.

Vowles said Miami was the first time Williams had to do serious team orders since he took charge and it was down to a cooling issue on Albon’s car that meant he needed to overtake or fall back by more than a second to get air into the radiator.

The problem triggered a lengthy discussion between engineers about what to do and one of them assured Sainz that “Alex won’t attack” while the other was still debating the best course of action.

Sainz, who joined from Ferrari in January, has formed a strong pairing with Albon at the resurgent former champions and the incident was the first apparent flare-up between them.

“I can give you a guarantee it won’t happen again with what we’ve changed,” said Vowles.

“Race engineers, actually for a lot of it, are parrots. So if you give them a long winded thing, they have to start thinking through and break it up,” he added when asked what had been done.

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

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

“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.”