Williams Racing appoints James Vowles as new team principal

Published by

Peter Davison

Grand Prix team Williams Racing has announced that James Vowles is becoming its Team Principal.

James will join the team on 20 February, ahead of the first Grand Prix in Bahrain.

He has been instrumental in securing nine F1 Constructors’ championships (with Brawn GP and Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team) and has overseen over 120 race victories.

James joins Wantage-based Williams after a 21-year career in Formula 1 so far, with his most recent role as Motorsport Strategy Director at Mercedes, a position he held for over four years.

Prior to that he fulfilled key engineering and strategy roles at Mercedes and former F1 teams including Honda Racing, Brawn GP and British American Racing.

The 43-year-old played a crucial role at Brawn, overseeing the race strategy that saw Jenson Button secure the 2009 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' title and the team take the Constructors’ Championship.

He stayed at the team’s Brackley base as it transitioned into Mercedes from the 2010 season and, since then, has played an integral role in the team’s many successes.

James said: "I cannot wait to start with Williams Racing. It's an honour to join a team with such an incredibly rich heritage.

"The team is an icon of our sport, one I greatly respect, and I am very much looking forward to the challenge. Mercedes have been hugely supportive on my journey, and we part on excellent terms after over 20 years of working in Brackley. I am grateful for everything Toto [Wolff] and the team have provided, and it has been such a special experience to journey together through failure and success.

"Williams Racing have placed their faith and trust in me, and I will do the same in return. Williams has tremendous potential, and our journey together starts in a matter of weeks.”

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.