SIMON ROBERTS

The Williams acting team principal on moving to the team after 16 years at Mclaren, and how new owner Dorilton intends to bring Williams from the back of the grid to the front

There have been a lot of changes this year for you and for the team. How different was your managing director role from what you were doing at Mclaren? And then how much has it evolved since you took on team principal duties?

The managing director role was very similar to what I did at Mclaren. Obviously it’s a different team but, in terms of the scope of the role and responsibility, it was almost the same. But since then it’s changed a bit. Since Claire [Williams] decided to leave I’ve had the chance of stepping up as team principal so now I’m much more involved with all the races rather than just some of the races, and everything to do with the top-level activities of the team.

How hands-on are the new owners, or are they keeping a watching brief at the moment?

They own nine other companies – this is their 10th acquisition – and all their other acquisitions, going back over the past nine or 10 years, have been long-term projects. We’re slightly different, because we’re a sports team, so it’s new to them. Their philosophy is to let the local management team run the business, and they’re there to support, to fill the gaps if we have any. Since they joined us, they’ve been on site a few times and been to a couple of races now. Things are really beginning to change back in the factory. We’re doing quite a lot of investment, putting right things that needed to be done, investing in a few new things, and just making sure that everything’s in good condition for going into 2021 and 2022. It’s kind of the normal investment process you get in any team – you put a business case forward for something, there’s a return on investment, or something gets fixed so there’s improvement in performance, and everything’s on a case-by-case basis.

They’re super easy to deal with, obviously highly intelligent and great people, and they love what we do – they want to drive team performance, and also to keep the values and feel of the team. So it’s still very family orientated, very diverse, which is important to them as well. We don’t want to lose any of that, what Claire and Frank built over many years, but on the other hand it’s a time of change, we really need to move on, and they’re really helping us do that. They’re back in the States so we have a management committee meeting with them once a week on Microsoft Teams, which goes pretty well. It feels like the right level of support – not overbearing, but asking the right questions.

Given your length of service at Mclaren, how long did it take you to understand the organisation given that you were moving between teams who very much have their own way of doing things?

You never understand everything – I was at Mclaren for 16 years but even then things used to surprise me from time to time. I knew it would take a minimum of three months to figure out what was going on, how things worked, what ticked and what didn’t. That time has been and gone, and I’m not sitting here saying

I know it all – I absolutely don’t. With the COVID restrictions we’ve had, about 20% of people are on site in the engineering offices and a few more on the shop floor, but the shop floor works on a rolling shift pattern over four days [GP Racing is speaking to Roberts before his positive diagnosis in the run-up to the Turkish GP].

So it takes longer to get to know people and for them to get to know me too. But in terms of the day-to-day operation of the business, I feel pretty comfortable I’ve got my head around how things work. Nothing’s broken, there’s no big single issue. But lots of things can be improved, things we can do better, and we’ve set up some of that stuff already. Just strengthening some of the processes and making things a lot clearer with people to make it easy for them to do a great job. That’s what I see as the main purpose of my role.

What sort of timescales are you working to with all of those tasks?

On a personal level, I haven’t mapped out a timeline. I have got a list of priorities, which is really about the sequence of getting things realigned or adjusted in a way that makes sense – there’s no point fixing some things before others are in place. So that process has already started. Some things are already in a good way and we can go to the next step.

At a slightly bigger picture we were kind of caught a little bit, because of the homologation of so many components for next year, there are things we’d like to change which we can’t. On the one hand, it holds us back a little bit. On the other hand, it makes life easier, because it’s not a whole new car. We see this as an opportunity internally to reset things in the team that would normally be a massive risk.

“NOTHING’S BROKEN, THERE’S NO BIG SINGLE ISSUE. BUT LOTS OF THINGS CAN BE IMPROVED, THINGS WE CAN DO BETTER”