Formula 1 needs to follow the NFL’s lead of working collaboratively as teams without worrying about who will win in order to strengthen the sport as a whole, according to James Vowles.
The Williams team principal has been pushing for a change of capital expenditure limits in the financial regulations to allow investment into the facilities at Grove, stating it’s impossible for his team to ever fight at the front with the current factory and equipment at its disposal.
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While Vowles acknowledges why rival teams are averse to opening the door to Williams gains, he says the wider end result of a more competitive F1 grid needs to be considered after failing to secure an agreement in the recent F1 Commission meeting in Belgium.
“This is about for the greater good of the sport and I really do believe this – and I appreciate I have more to gain than others – you need it to be that on any given Sunday you don’t know who’s going to particularly win and that dominance doesn’t exist the way it does at the moment,” Vowles said. “I think that’s good for the sport.
“To do that everyone needs to have facilities that are… not even on par, but the ability to produce performance and move forward and that’s not the case today. We had a great meeting with Roger (Goodell) – the CEO of the NFL – in Canada who explained the value of the teams went up exponentially, certainly by multiples, at the point where all teams realized it doesn’t matter who wins, it matters you work together on that journey.
“We’re not there today. We’re still on a journey where everyone is concerned, and rightly so, about the bottom line of where they finish in the championship today. It’s hard to know what’s going to change over the next two months, which is the next point we’ll get together and talk about all of this, because everyone’s fears of where they lie in the championship and how it affects them short-term and how powerful Williams could become as a result of it, will still be there.
“What I’m hoping, out of all of it, is it’s undoubtedly agreed in that room that Williams, amongst all the peers, is the one with the least amount of facilities and that needs rectifying. We’ll have another go at fixing that and seeing if we can get other people’s mindsets to modify.”
Vowles says there were good discussions recently around why it is not as simple as increasing CapEx across the board for all teams, but says if progress is to be made then other teams will need to accept they are giving up something to those with the worst facilities.
“If I wind back, February 20th, a few days after I started here, was the first day I put on the table that we as Williams need help, we cannot compete at the front with the facilities we have at the factory. That remains the case today, that hasn’t changed. And in five months or so it’s unfortunate and disappointing frankly that we’re in a situation where again that meeting went round in circles if nothing else.
“And to an extent it will do because everyone in that room wants to make sure they’re not losing out relative to everyone else, and there’s no way of doing it. There’s no way of just letting Williams gain facilities, especially in a circumstance where we’re sitting seventh in the championship.
“Other teams will be hurt by the fact we could put millions in, and some are in different positions – some don’t have the money to spend, some don’t want to spend the money, some are fearful of change. Aligning that in one room in the space of two hours is simply not possible.
“The actions we’ve taken out of it are that we will extend the deadline for the five votes for financial (regulation changes) from September to the end of October, that’s option number one. The FIA has been tasked to find another solution that is amenable.
“On every vote it wasn’t a surprise particularly how it voted, when we spoke about who needs to catch up, basically on one side of the table – this is a coincidence by the way we don’t line up this way – was the teams at the back end of the grid and on the other side of the table the teams at the front end of the grid, and it’d be no surprise that the back end of the grid near enough unanimously had their hands up for most of the votes and the ones at the front end of the grid did not. (Although) there’s some exceptions to that.”