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“Williams, it’s James!” read the headline at the top of the Mercedes Formula 1 team’s website.
Mercedes happily played up to the internet meme around its outgoing strategy chief when last month it announced James Vowles’ departure to become Williams team principal – a role he officially takes up today.
Vowles’ voice is familiar to all F1 fans as the one that appeared in the ears of Mercedes drivers during races, and particularly for “Valtteri, it’s James” messages that sparked one of F1’s best-known memes back in 2018.
His radio interjections were deliberately rare as they were saved for moments when things needed to be escalated up the Mercedes chain of command.
Vowles was usually deployed to intervene if a driver was either challenging their strategy or their race engineer, but sometimes had the unpleasant task of enforcing team orders on Valtteri Bottas, too.
The first notable “Valtteri, it’s James” interjection came when Vowles apologetically instructed Bottas to stop attacking team-mate Lewis Hamilton late in the 2018 German Grand Prix.
More famously, five races later, he started a message telling Bottas to move aside for Hamilton in Russia with the same words.
It has happened several times since and, while easily mocked and quite funny, the running joke does a disservice to the responsibility Vowles had.
He was basically the last resort before team boss Toto Wolff had to wade in. So if Vowles came on the radio, it was a clear sign the driver needed to take it seriously.
That’s underlined by the circumstances in which those messages were deployed in 2018.
Coming into that year’s chaotic, wet-dry Hockenheim race, Hamilton was eight points behind championship rival Sebastian Vettel having only won once in the preceding five grands prix, and was starting only 14th after a hydraulic problem in qualifying.
But Hamilton came through the field, Vettel crashed out of the lead in changeable weather and suddenly Mercedes was running 1-2 at a safety car restart with 10 laps to go.
Bottas – 59 points behind Hamilton at this stage and not a realistic title contender – pushed hard to take the lead at the restart, Hamilton responded firmly, and Vowles reached for the radio button…
It prompted mild, politely expressed frustration from Bottas and led to Wolff having to justify the decision and defend Mercedes against suggestions it was favouring Hamilton to too great an extent even considering the championship situation.
“If it had been the other way around, with Valtteri in the lead and Lewis second, we would have made the same call. Identical call,” Wolff argued.
“It was about bringing it home, irrespective of who was in the front.
“When they started to be all over each other at the restart, it was still raining at places, or it was still humid. And we had so much bad luck in the last couple of races that the scenario of losing a car, or two, it was just something that I didn’t want to even envisage.”
The more contentious ‘Valtteri, it’s James’ deployment in Russia that year came at a time the championship situation had swung pretty definitively in Mercedes’ favour.
Hamilton – who never lost the points lead he took at Hockenheim – was by now 40 points clear of Vettel with six races left.
Bottas (110 points behind Hamilton) beat his team-mate to Sochi pole and they led away with Vettel on their tail.
Max Verstappen’s Red Bull coming through from the back of the grid and likely to be running long complicated the leaders’ tactics and put extra pressure on pitstop timings – though in the end Verstappen’s pace was so good that they all emerged behind him for a spell anyway.
Mercedes brought Bottas in first but then left the championship leader out one lap too long – which Wolff took the blame for, saying it was due to him distracting Vowles with strategy debate at the moment the call should’ve been made – and got Hamilton stuck in a wheel-to-wheel battle with Vettel that was going to have tyre life repercussions.
So Mercedes switched Bottas into wingman mode, Vowles’ call went out and Bottas allowed his team-mate past and focused on protecting him from Vettel.
With Vettel dropping away later on, the option to give the lead back to Bottas was there. Mercedes didn’t take it. Hamilton ended the day 50 points ahead of Vettel and Bottas was mathematically out of the title hunt.
It was one of the more ruthless team orders moments of Hamilton and Bottas’s time together at Mercedes. Hamilton said it “doesn’t feel spectacular” to win via such clear assistance and the mood around the whole Mercedes camp was far from celebratory.
The championship battle trajectory meant views were polarised. All the signs were that the title fight was effectively over and Hamilton wasn’t really going to need the extra seven points Bottas handed him at Sochi. Sure enough he beat Vettel by 88 points come the end of the season.
But going into the race with ‘only’ a win and a second place as Hamilton’s points cushion, Mercedes wasn’t willing to bank on feelings or momentum. The championship fight was still open, Vettel was still a threat – if Bottas could be used to neutralise him, Mercedes was going to do it.
“You need to consider the championship,” argued Wolff.
“If at the end five points or three points are missing, then you’re the biggest idiot on the planet for having prioritised Valtteri’s single race result over the championship.”
Vowles was integral to those calls as well as being the man to deliver them. The ‘it’s James’ memes may on the surface be jokes about incoming bad news or the various misfortunes of Bottas’s career, but the truth behind them is that Vowles was vital to decisions that helped make Mercedes such an ominous title-winning machine.
And that experience and attitude is what Williams is now getting to help its quest to get back to F1 respectability.
