Williams' Vowles sees chance for 'lucky' podium in 2025 615x

MONTREAL - Williams is striving to return to the front in the coming years, but team principal James Vowles isn't discounting the possibility of an unexpected podium in 2025. 2j5zf

"I believe that a lucky podium could happen, but it's not what I want as a podium," Vowles told theScore on Friday. "I want to earn the podium because we've deserved it based on performance and pace. I think deserving it based on performance is very unlikely (in 2025). I think a lucky podium, it's got a small probability. It's not zero, which perhaps it once was years before. And it will mean the world to me when we do that."

He added: "But I'm looking forward to the day when you ask me the question of when's the first win coming and when is the first championship coming? Those are the steps that I look forward (to)."

Williams is off to its best start through nine races since 2016. The team enters the Canadian Grand Prix with 54 points, slotting the outfit as the "best of the rest" behind McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes, and Red Bull. In each of the previous two seasons, at least five teams appeared on the podium. Williams has itched close this year, with Alex Albon finishing fifth three times.

"When I ed in '23, I found an individual who was a little bit battered and bruised to be completely truthful," Vowles said of Albon. "He grew quite a bit in '23. He grew in '24 but made a big, big step, '24 to '25. What you see today is a human who's not making mistakes on weekends, just focused on what he wants to achieve, really good , really good way of bringing engineers along the journey with him, as well, at the same time. And yet he does all that without hiding any information from Carlos (Sainz). In fact, quite the opposite."

Vowles credited the Albon-Sainz tandem for Williams' progress. He noted that while the pair approaches things from different angles, their is aligned.

"Alex approaches it from 'I'm driving this way.' Carlos approaches it from, 'Have a look at the data here. This is going on.' Those two combined actually give us a huge strength to find what we're looking for," Vowles said. "I'm confident, very confident, one of the reasons why this car has moved forward is we have two drivers working together."

Despite the car's progress, Vowles added that Williams didn't put much focus on 2025 as it quickly swapped in the 2026 car in the wind tunnel in early January. Vowles, who previously told theScore the team aims to fight for wins by 2028, said prioritizing future gains was an "easy" one.

"The difference between this year and next year is a clean sheet of paper. We can tear everything up that we've ever known and start again from scratch, and that really excites me. It's an opportunity to get rid of 10 to 15 years' worth of items that I couldn't with this year's car," Vowles said.

"I love that we're moving forward. I love what it means to the team. But the only way we're going to go forward again from here is to keep going on this aggressive pathway. So it's one of the easiest decisions I've had to make."