Williams team principal James Vowles explained the confusion which prompted Carlos Sainz Jnr’s critical radio messages after the Miami Grand Prix.
Sainz believed his team mate Alexander Albon overtook him when he had been ordered not to during the race. Albon went on to finish fifth, Sainz ninth.
“You told me he’s been told,” Sainz said to race engineer Gaetan Jego after Albon passed him. “I know,” Jego replied, “let’s be the bigger one, okay?”
“That’s not how I go racing, guys,” Sainz complained after the race. “I don’t care. I’ve lost a lot of confidence here on everything.”
Vowles admitted the situation was “the part that frustrated me the most from the race weekend.”
He said Albon, whose car was beginning to overheat, was on the point of overtaking Sainz when the team decided to tell their drivers to maintain a distance from each other.
“A message was communicated to both race engineers, effectively that Alex had a reliability problem and we needed to get some air into the radiators,” said Vowles in a video released by the team. “That was communicated to both with the decision of just making a little gap between the cars for the time being to make sure we do that.
“However, that message wasn’t clear in its construct. It wasn’t even clear on whether overtaking was possible or not. The primary function is getting the car cool to move forward.
“To Carlos the message was communicated: ‘Alex won’t attack you’ and to Alex that same message was communicated that he isn’t to overtake Carlos, but only [once] his DRS was open and he was effectively alongside Carlos completing the overtake.
“So this isn’t Alex going against team orders, this is on us as a team as an organisation to significantly tighten up how we communicate to the engineers and how quickly we communicate to the drivers.”
Vowles is determined to avoid a repeat of the confusion. “What I can assure everyone is it simply won’t happen again,” he said.
However he admitted the team was preparing to move Albon past Sainz due to damage on the latter’s car, which was affecting his pace.
“Even once we had stabilised them, we more than likely would have very quickly inverted the cars,” he said. “The reason behind that is Carlos had sustained damage from that lap one incident and it was getting worse and worse.
“We could see the floor was deteriorating, that’s part of the reason why Alex was getting closer and closer to him and able to re-overtake. The loss was really mounting into a couple of tenths by this point. So more than likely we would have done that, but again that would be a team decision rather than a driver not expecting to be attacked.”
He said he understood Sainz’s frustrated reaction during and after the race. “I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have drivers being frustrated by what happens out on-track. They’re giving their heart and soul to it, so in the case of Carlos he was there fighting for a fifth place on merit.
“In the circumstance where something catches you off-guard and you’re not sure whether it was the driver or anything else going on, it can frustrate you. But his passion is exactly why I want him in this team and in the car.
“We spent quite a bit of time post-race and again on Monday talking through it – the incident actually was just a few minutes, but more importantly [on] how we as a team move forward from that and do a better job altogether in the future.”
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