Williams boss James Vowles says the Formula 1 squad have made changes to their processes to ensure there will be no repeat of the team order miscommunication that left Carlos Sainz frustrated in Miami.
Sainz was annoyed that team mate Alex Albon overtook him with the pair running sixth and seventh, having been told they would be holding position with Albon nursing a water pressure issue.
Albon was given that instruction and then told he could race Sainz, with the latter not getting the adjusted messaging before the move was done, hence the mix-up. It was the first flashpoint between the two leading drivers since they became team mates this season.
Speaking to select media at the team’s headquarters in Grove, UK, Vowles said it was «resolved in about two minutes» when the three of them discussed it after the race. «That is very much on us as a team,» he added.
Sainz and Albon seem to get on well out of the car at the moment
«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 pit wall. 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.'»
Williams have a fast car this season and are comfortably fifth in the standings
Vowles says the team plans to clean up their communication to the driver, with a focus on «short, concise, to the point» messages.
He added: «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.
«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.
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«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’.»
Williams head to this weekend’s Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in P5 in the Teams’ Championship, having scored points with both cars in each of the last two Grands Prix.
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