When James Vowles was 19, he wrote to every Formula One team on the grid. All 11 said no. The rejection letters arrived on lovely headed paper, so he Blu-Tacked them to his bedroom wall and left them there.
Twenty-five years later, Vowles has a 2009 world championship with Brawn GP, eight straight constructors’ titles as a strategist at Mercedes, and the keys to Atlassian Williams F1 Team, the storied British team he watched on television as a kid and the one he is now trying to drag back to the front after two decades in the wilderness.
I spoke with Vowles this week while he was in Austin for the United States Grand Prix, the first of three back-to-back race weekends. I came in expecting to learn about racing, and speed, and perhaps even strategy. But I left with lessons on leadership and resilience.
That is not an accident. Vowles has led – with resilience – at every altitude. He ran a Formula 3 team at 19, sat on the pit wall through the most dominant run in the sport’s history, and has been a founder twice over, building a driver-training school and a race-strategy software company that grew to roughly 84 people across Germany, London and New York, all while holding down a full-time Formula One job. He thinks about Williams the way the best leaders think about a turnaround: what can we do that nobody else is willing to try?
Here are the five lessons from one of the sharpest operators in motorsport, and how each one is showing up in the rebuild at Williams.
1. Treat Every Dead End As An Inventory Check
The 11 rejections did not send Vowles into a different career. They sent him back to school. Two of the teams, Williams and British American Racing, told him the same thing: we don’t need mathematicians, we need rounded engineers. So he finished his math and computer science degree, taught himself engineering over a summer, and enrolled in a master’s at Cranfield University as the only student in the program without an engineering background. Within three months of joining a Formula 3 team as a data scientist, he had been handed the checkbook and told to run it.
Then came 2008. Honda pulled out of Formula One in the middle of the financial crisis and the entire team, Vowles included, lost their jobs overnight. His response was to start two companies at once.
“Anytime I get into a situation that looks like a dead end, you’re never in a dead end,” he told me. “Dead end comes up. You’re like, all right, what can I do? What skills have I got?”
The driver-training business was profitable within weeks. The strategy-software company scaled to dozens of employees and three offices before he sold it. Neither existed before the layoff.
Every leader knows this feeling. The budget gets cut, the key hire walks, the strategy you spent a year building gets overtaken by events. Vowles’s move is not to grieve the door that closed. It is to take stock of what is still in the room: the skills, the relationships, the half-built tools. Then he builds with those.
“There’s nothing that particularly scares me,” he said. “I actually quite like the challenge, because you can always find yourself in a better position as the result of it if you push yourself.”
2. Pick A North Star That Is Bigger Than You
Vowles left Mercedes at the peak of the most dominant run in Formula One history. He had money. He had a championship-winning operation around him. Why walk into a team that had spent most of two decades near the back of the grid?
“I’m not interested in money,” he said. “I’m interested in making a difference to the world and leaving my DNA and fingerprint on the world. And that drives you far more than anything else ever can and will.”
Williams was the team he followed as a kid. It has nine constructors’ championships and a 50-year history. Restoring it is a goal he cannot complete in a quarter, or a season, or possibly even several seasons. That is the point.
When I asked whether he feels the pull to go back to Mercedes, he was blunt: “My drive is to make this team successful. That’s what I’m going to do.” And later: “I’m obstinate enough that I will not give up until this is successful.”
There is a practical reason this matters for leaders, beyond the romance. A North Star that sits far above the day-to-day is what lets you make unpopular, long-horizon decisions without flinching. It is what let Vowles skip celebrating a podium season, because podiums were never the goal. It is also what makes a team coherent. Vowles says he could pull any employee at Williams onto a call and they would rattle off the team’s three North Stars without hesitation.
Leaders chasing a title or a headline will quit when those get hard to reach. Leaders chasing a fingerprint on the world tend not to.
3. Humility Beats Headcount
The greatest underdog story in modern Formula One is Brawn GP, the team that rose from Honda’s ashes in 2009 and won both world championships in its only season. Vowles was in the room. I asked him what the team got right.
“This sounds odd, but humbleness and no ego,” he said. “Everyone in the room was a co-function. We all wanted one goal, and that was survival of the team. It was more important than any of us.”
The numbers were brutal. Roughly 900 people before the first race in Melbourne, cut to about 400 almost overnight. Everyone knew it was roughly a coin flip whether the team would last the year. They worked anyway. “Everyone worked till the last minute because they wanted their piece of them to be in that car,” Vowles said.
With no money, they improvised. They pulled brakes off show cars. They tested on 50-lap-old tires because there was nothing else to run on. It was, in his words, survival by attrition.
And then, late in the season at Monza, the team took a risk that Vowles still calls his proudest moment. Qualifying rules at the time forced a choice between a one-stop and a two-stop strategy. Vowles was adamant: one stop, even though it meant starting seventh and eighth instead of on pole. “I’m okay with it because we can win the race,” he recalled saying. Brawn finished first and second. “That moment changed history,” he said. “That was the point at which I went, yeah, I think this championship we can win.”
The lesson for leaders is twofold. First, a lean team with no egos and one shared goal will outrun a bloated one with ten. Second, scarcity is not an excuse to play it safe. “Even when it was at the most difficult time, there was no fear about doing what is right and what is brave,” Vowles said. The teams that survive the near-death moment are usually the ones that kept swinging through it.
4. Own The Mistake In Seconds, Then Put It In A Box
In 2018, at the Austrian Grand Prix, Vowles made a strategy call for Lewis Hamilton under a safety car. It was the wrong one. Hamilton started to spiral on the radio.
So Vowles keyed the mic. “Lewis, James. I made a mistake. This is on me. But here’s what we’re going to do about it.”
It made headlines, because in Formula One nobody takes the blame on an open channel. “You take the blame, you’re fired the next week,” Vowles said. He did it anyway, and he did not deliberate. “It wasn’t even prompted. It was just me doing it because that’s how I am. I’m so secure in who I am and what I’m doing. I made, like, a thousand good decisions and one bad decision, so be comfortable with that.”
Notice what the apology did. It gave an elite performer, knocked out of his flow state, somewhere to put his anger so he could get back to driving. And it told the whole team that the person at the top would not hide behind them.
Then comes the part most leaders skip. Vowles compartmentalizes the failure, fast. “It’s got to have a box around it pretty quickly,” he said. Identify the mistake, understand the cause, put the prevention in place, close the lid. “If you leave strands of it out, that’s pretty dangerous.”
He says the best drivers do the same thing in under a second. Hamilton loses a tenth in a corner and immediately runs the diagnosis: wind, tires, or did I over-push? Yes, it’s wind. Correct in the next two corners. Box it. Done. Most of us, Vowles observed, are more like tennis players: one unforced error and the whole match tilts, because the mistake never got boxed.
Leaders fail in public constantly. The ones who last are the ones who own it immediately, fix the system, and refuse to let one bad call bleed into the next hundred.
5. Being Behind Is A License To Leap
Here is where the leadership playbook and the Williams turnaround meet.
When Vowles arrived at Grove in 2023, he found a team whose infrastructure, systems and processes were, by his own estimate, about 20 years out of date. Most leaders would treat that as a reason to copy the winners. Vowles treats it as freedom.
“We’re not going to win by doing the same as everyone else five years later,” he said. “We are going to win because we are doing leaps.”
His logic is the challenger’s logic. An incumbent with mature systems cannot make a monumental change without breaking what already works, which is exactly why long-dominant teams tend to stop dominating. A challenger has nothing to protect. “I have zero fear of making leaps that may be in the wrong direction, but from where we are, it’s not going to be such a big problem,” he said.
So he has changed what gets funded. Proposals that mirror what Mercedes or Red Bull already do get a no. “If you come to me with a technology change that is different to what everyone else is doing, that may have a risk to it, let’s say it’s a 50/50 chance, I’ll fund it, because that’s what I’m interested in.” He has the board’s backing to take those swings even at the cost of short-term results.
The leap also runs through people. Vowles borrows the A/B/C framework: A players lead and pull others forward, B players work hard but need daily direction, C players block. The math, in his telling, is unforgiving. Put three As, three Cs and four Bs in a room and the culture nets out negative. “If you just get rid of one C, you actually can shift it quite quickly,” he said. He also grades himself honestly. He rates his senior leadership team a seven out of ten today, up from a four or five, and admits he is still operating more tactically than a team principal should, because the pathways beneath him are not yet built.
The results are coming in stages. In 2025, Williams climbed to fifth in the constructors’ championship with multiple podium finishes, its best season in years. The 2026 season, under a sweeping new set of technical regulations, has been far harder, and Vowles has absorbed public criticism for it. He does not sound rattled. A rebuild that bets on leaps will have seasons where the leap lands short. The question leaders should ask is not whether the challenger stumbled, but whether it is still swinging at something the incumbents won’t touch.
The Five Minutes Before The Grid
One more thing, because it surprised me most.
Right up until the lights go out, Vowles has microphones in his face. Interviews run almost to the start. So before he walks out to the grid, he takes five minutes that everyone on the team knows not to interrupt. “What it allows me to do is to clear my brain out of any thought,” he said. “Then all the thoughts for me just come back in, in a really nice sequential order of what I’ve got to be doing that day. It’s basically a clearing and a sorting.”
Then he goes out and attacks it. He says he is never nervous once a race begins. What takes over is flow, the heightened state he describes as the reason he has not left the sport in 25 years. He cannot tell you whether he was on the pit wall for one minute or two hours.
It is a useful reminder for anyone leading a team at full throttle. The pause is not the opposite of speed. It is what makes the speed usable.
Vowles would be the first to admit the cost of his own intensity. He talks openly about having no off switch, about 16-hour days, about a success bar set so high that podiums barely register. He draws a line between training to win and training to dominate, and he puts himself and Hamilton in the second camp. The downside, he says, is real. “If you don’t start taking pleasure out of it, why are you doing it?”
So I asked whether a Williams championship would be worth a pause. For once, he said yes. “This is where a company has come from 20 years of not doing anything back to the front,” he said. “I will probably take a moment on that.”
Leaders, take the five minutes. The grid will still be there.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com