James Vowles on Spa: “We’re in a good place”

As Formula 1 heads towards the final race before the summer break, Team Principal James Vowles was optimistic in the latest episode of The Vowles Verdict, presented by Kraken.

“It was a strong weekend for us in Spa,” he began. “It's great to walk away with 11 more points. We brought a performance update and it was working from the outset.”

James addressed the challenges of the Belgian GP weekend, saying, “it's always tough in a Sprint race weekend to get on top of all of the changes but what I'm pleased to say is that, given the way we're working and have been working across the last few years, we can bring performance to even these difficult weekends, with a mixture of weather and not enough running, and walk away with a good result.”

It’s no secret that competition is very tight across the field this year, but James is up for the battle.

“You can see that just a matter of milliseconds will make a difference of between 5 and 7 positions, as we saw in Qualifying.

“Going into Q3, you're now in a place where just a few milliseconds – a small mistake on track – can separate P6 from P14. There's only a couple of tenths separating those two [positions].

“And by the way, I think that's a good thing for the show. So we're really playing with fine differences and fine margins between the cars.”

And as ever, despite some positive results on both Saturday and Sunday, Vowles has his focus firmly set on further progress.

“We're still in a situation here where it was fantastic for Carlos on Friday, going through into Saturday morning to finish P6 in the Sprint – and great for Alex with his P5 qualifying and P6 in the main race.

“But on both occasions we've had the other car outside of the points, and to make sure that we're really capitalising on the car’s performance, we really do need both scoring on any given weekend at the same time.”

You can hear more of James’ reflections from the Belgian Grand Prix in the latest episode of The Vowles Verdict, presented by Kraken.